Breathe
By Brenda Macias
I made my debut as a stand-up in La Casa del Humor, thanks to a course I took for beginners with Julio Sandoval, whom I thank for sharing with me the basic principles to do comedy, even with a broken heart.
Nine of us dared to make a fool of ourselves without fear one Saturday night. It was October 5th. And now that raffles are in fashion, I put my hand in a box and I was number one to go on stage, under the cover of one of my favorite songs: "Dramas y comedias", by Fangoria. Because yes, because I don't want any more dramas in my life, only entertaining comedies, as Alaska says in this beautiful song.
Among the topics addressed in the show were social phobia, constipation, living in Tláhuac and having a short penis, reaching 30 and being a specialist in washing dishes, being single and going from the friendzone to the family zone, surviving the pandemic without having sex, the father figure and soccer, and being Mexican and getting only foreign flirts.
My routine was about two characters that inhabit me: Lolita and Amargot, water and oil; light and darkness: one is equanimous and the other is a specialist in wrapping herself in monumental red flags and submitting with parsimony to gaslighting.
From a distance, I understand the maxim Julio told us: comedy is tragedy for longer. In other words: when tragedy is left to rest, laughter ensues. I finally made sense of that magic phrase: "we'll laugh about this", right after you shed all the tears you had in reserve when you realized you had been left in the lurch.
During the Saturdays of August and September I gave myself the opportunity to distance myself from what hurts, what bothers and worries me in order to laugh out loud. It was really a healing exercise in which I connected with something primal: showing my teeth as lionesses do to protect their pride. Because like sleep, from a Freudian perspective, laughter and humor lighten the burden of life and take away the fear of ridicule.
I say this because when I was reviewing what laughter and humor are, I came across a beautiful article by Nidia Vincent, who in 2003, in the journal Acta Poética, of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas of the UNAM, analyzed the following: El cuerpo que ríe: dinámicas de la comicidad teatral.
In this article, the philologist from the Universidad Veracruzana, masterfully describes the power of laughter and humor to take distance and heal. In the text she explains that the humorist is the one who has the ingenuity to make jokes and parodies, through the techniques of dramaturgy. On the other hand, she who has a sense of humor is able to see the humorous because a sense of humor is a capacity and a state of equanimity. In this context, humor is changeable and cultural. That is to say, what made us laugh in the times of "El Chavo del 8" today is cancelable.
Laughter and humor are elements of human nature, they are healing and cathartic. According to Freud, laughter is the strategy of the psychic apparatus to evade pain. And it is true, even Vincent mentions that seeing life with indifference allows drama to become comedy because farce amplifies the distance from pain, while sympathy/empathy makes us fragile and prey to emotional predators.
We could even say that in times of digital media, the consumption of humor and laughter is done on a large scale. We pay to laugh. In fact, on the day of my show, my closest and dearest friends, my chosen family, paid to see the show at the end of my course. Thank you for so much love! For laughing with me the experience of comic, almost cosmic joy, for sharing with me one of the most revealing days of my life.
It was so powerful to have done comedy that I freed myself from prejudices and conventions, I was able to show the rigidity of life. Through comedy I confronted the vices and pain that kept me tied down. Thanks to laughter I have softened my own existence and I have been able to detect and dynamite what I do not want in my life. By laughing at the state of grace and ridiculing my aggressive instinct I buried bad humor and suffering. Today I feel better.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
Comments ()