Humour is not understood. No need to do that. The explanation about laughter makes your experience worse. And, don’t get confused, no laughter is better or worse than yours. Yes, there is, of course, the brain comedy, the surreal and the Gamberra, but the best, in any case, will always be the one that comes out of the stomach, which you can not contain. Come with Shorty, Jim Carrey or Andy Kaufman.
I confess. I, for one, never laughed with Shorty. But, like my lack of faith in life after death, it’s something I could never explain. It escapes all logic. I will not argue, however, that the humorist was unique, influential and inspiring and, above all, that he made an uncontrollable laugh. The funny thing has no explanation.
Neither did Andy Kaufman’s deconstructed humour. On the first Saturday Night Live, this iconoclast simply went on stage, turned on the Supermouse music and launched to make playback of loose verses. During the remainder of its performance, undaunted was maintained. Although it seems incredible, it was the most amusing of the mythical episode. Also uncomfortable and disconcerting. There was nothing like it.
When Jim Carrey got into his head in the brilliant Man on the Moon, the actor, who had also made his own style of comedy, saw it clear: he had to become Kaufman even in his personal life. The Netflix documentary Jim and Andy returns now behind the cameras to inquire into the minds of these two masters of humour whose voice could never be copied. Because after that experience nothing was ever the same again. That mutation had left in the star of the grimaces and the 10 million a dreg of melancholy that would never shed any more of that kindly Mr. Hyde who always sought to please.
When Carrey said good-bye to Kaufman, they turned their troubles. Today he remembers them and it is impossible not to feel close. Even if we, mere mortals, will never fully understand the speed at which his mind runs, that genial psychosis that accompanies him in humour, and also in sickness.
