大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Hope Lonergan

Good Morning!

So, as a working comedian I鈥檓 resigning myself to the non-growth and socioeconomic descent of any form of precarious employment; to a vision of work life that writer and professor Madeline Lane-McKinley describes as 鈥渃onstant juggling, frantic side-hustles, living off credit cards, family favours, and impossible debts鈥�. (For instance, I once did a gig where the 鈥榮tage鈥� was a buffet table and the 鈥榝ee鈥� was a bit of buffet from the buffet table.)

And since comedians are all gig workers looking out to a 鈥� horizon of deteriorating career options and prospects of security鈥� there must be something, that compels us to get onstage. For me, it鈥檚 the power of the comic mode as a ritual of the human spirit.

鈥淗uman existence at its best, both individually and collectively, is a running interplay between seriousness and laughter, sense and nonsense, sacred concerns and comic interludes,鈥� writes historian and Presbyterian minister Conrad Hyers.

Life is at its most vibrant when the lines are blurred between profundity and triviality 鈥� allowing us to catheterise experience and temporarily drain it of its misery. (Example: When my Nan passed away I told my Mum I was gonna use her earthly remains as a toboggan. This could be seen as bad taste and disrespectful 鈥� but, as a family, we know the rules of morbid humour, and how the inappropriateness is kind of the point, so Muv and I shared a moment of unexpected, delinquent laughter.)

With this in mind. God, thank you for revealing the comic essence, the absurdity, of experience. Thank you for showing me the spirit which comedy represents 鈥� and for accepting those moments where we 鈥渢ie down the angel in us鈥� and succumb to comic relief. And please tell Nan it was only a joke.

Now go lightly.

Amen.

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