RonPrice
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Jan 3, 2008, 11:52 PM
Post #1 of 1
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There is very little on film or television that moves me to laughter. I am often amused, tickled, impressed by the cleverness of some comedian but, if I watch a whole program I am out of spirits half way through and distinctly disjointed by the last phase of the sequence. As the piece progresses, my laughter becomes mechanical and each chuckle intensifies my ill-at-easeness. At the end of the program I feel flat and empty. I also feel I have wasted my time. -Ron Price with thanks to G.B. Shaw on Oscar Wilde in Bernard Shaw: A Critical View, Nicholas Grene, MacMillan Press, London, 1984, p.4.
Laughter is idiosyncratic, canned,
a commercial product. I feel it inside,
welling-up, fast, a spontaneous explosion,
frequently in Seinfeld, a program of skits
about nothing, trivia, the spaces in relationships,
self-centered human beings. I dig the absurd,
my laughs and millions of others
in this most popular of programs,
where the energies of comedy are harnessed,
dynamically: do we understand ourselves
in the end? Society? I create nothing.
I invent nothing. I imagine nothing.
I see the drama and laugh at everyday nothingness.
Can I call these laughs spiritual relaxation?
Filling my pocket full with the most delightful emptiness
and the weight of the day lifts, exploded into thin air.
Ron Price
16 August 1998
(Updated for TV Forums
3/1/08)
married for 41 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 48
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