People

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Would You Define Your Life as a Comedy or a Tragedy?

The same question goes for the movie Garden State.

I have struggled for a solid ten years trying to figure out what makes things funny. Universally, seeing someone fall down (who doesn’t get hurt) is always funny, but I don’t know why. Defining what humor is, is almost impossible to simply and briefly put into words. What I can do is make a judgment call on whether something as a whole is a comedy or a drama.

One of my college professors taught me there is a clear way to distinguish between the two: Comedy involves a protagonist who in the beginning of the story is standing outside the borders of his society and by the end of the story is accepted into it. Therefore a tragedy is when the protagonist in the beginning is accepted as part of the society but by the end is expelled from it.

To test this theory on comedies, I will take Adam Sandler for example: Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, The Water Boy, The Wedding Singer, and Big Daddy all involve a character who starts out as one or more of the following: incompetent, poor, lonely, selfish. By the end of the movie, Adam Sandler’s character is accepted into the fold as these previous attributes are resolved. So I can see how the definition of a comedy works here.

For tragedies, I will take some horror movies for example: The Blair Witch Project, Skeleton Key, The Strangers, Quarantine, and Carrie. The protagonists end up either dead or in a really bad situation by the time the credits roll. So I can see how the definition of a tragedy works here, as death or loss of freedom is a way of being ousted from a society that the protagonists were once a part of.

The end of a movie ultimately defines it as a comedy or tragedy. Garden State, which is more a drama than anything, ends with Zach Braff’s character being able to overcome his dependence on his doctor’s/father’s misdiagnosed prescription of anti-depressants and feel alive for the first time as he moves back home to New Jersey, making new friends and finding love: That’s a comedy.

Using this theory, these other genre-vague movies would also be considered comedy: Fight Club, Forrest Gump, and Elizabethtown. And these would be tragedy: Into the Wild, Vanilla Sky, and One Hour Photo.

Life is comprised of rotating moments of comedy and tragedy. Times where I’m on the outside looking in and I get in (comedy) and times where I’m inside but am pushed out (tragedy). In ways big and small. But a person’s general perspective will cause him or her to see it ultimately as one or the other:

 

If life is comedy-in-progress, then life is me trying to figure out how to be normal enough to succeed in being accepted by my immediate society, eventually dying satisfied, knowing I’m surrounded by those who love me.

If life is tragedy-in-progress, then life is me already having everything I need and want in life but having it all taken away from me in the end, eventually dying sad and alone.

Big decisions, big decisions. I’ll go with comedy-in-progress.

 

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I Was Born in a Small Town

While movies we watch tend to portray life in the “big city” because it’s more practical to film in larger cities, I would say that the settings of Country songs portray what life was like for most of us while growing up, whether the hometown is in the South or not. In fact, I can’t really think of anyone I personally know who grew up in the heart of a big city. Small towns and suburbs seem to be much more relevant to America as I know it, compared to the city life I grew up seeing on John Hughes’ movies set in Chicago (like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and Saved by the Bell which was set near Los Angeles. Somewhere between Seinfeld and Little House on the Prairie is the setting of my real life.

Spending my first 18 years in Fort Payne, Alabama, it seemed everyone I knew pretty much knew everything about me. Actually, I should say that everyone knew everything about everyone. There was no avoiding it. I graduated in a class of 183 students, most of whom I knew from at least Kindergarten. Their parents had seen me grow up. We pretty much all went to one of four main churches (either Baptist or Methodist).

Just saying the name “Fort Payne” has the same connotation to me as the word “cousin” or “aunt” or “1st grade teacher”- people who knew me as a kid that cried when E.T. had to leave Elliot to go back to his home planet. People who I could never try to act too cool around- they simply know me too well. That’s what my hometown is to me.

And that’s not a bad thing, at all. There definitely is a unique comfort in a home town. Hence the word “home”.

Back in February, my wife and I had a free weekend so we decided to spend it at a free bed-and-breakfast in Fort Payne (my parents’ house). We noticed how quiet and peaceful the city is. The opposite of the life we often know in Nashville. My wife wanted to take a driving tour of the place, so since I had already shown her the tourist spots (the canyon and the waterfall) I decided to drive her around the neighborhoods I spent time in.

As I drove up the big hill where we as Cub Scouts had a box car race, I saw my friend Alex Igou’s dad working in the yard. My wife was amazed that he knew who I was right away and that we talked a good 10 minutes before we went on our way to get some coffee at the local coffee shop. Which is owned and ran by my other friend Alex Pate’s mom. While there, the other customers who came in also greeted me by name. That caused my wife to say, “Do you know EVERYBODY in this town?!”

Pretty much. Nearly all 13,000 of them. Or I would least be recognized as “Jack Shell’s boy”. I learned that the same reasons an 18-year old kid was ready to leave his small hometown on Graduation Day became the same reasons I found the town endearing today, ten years later.

The town that for a brief time in 1989 held the record for the world’s largest cake. The town that the Country music super-group Alabama put on the map. The town with the self-proclaimed title “Sock Capitol of the World”, which is proudly displayed on the green Fort Payne City Limits sign with the word “capitol” being misspelled. Maybe one day they’ll finally fix that sign.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Payne

This article was posted in The Franklin News of Franklin, TX in July 2009.

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Why One Out of Five People in the World Smoke Tobacco

Could 1.2 billion people really be wrong?

It would be difficult to imagine unintentionally eavesdropping in Starbucks and hearing this conversation: “You know, I feel that I’m missing something in my life. Maybe I should start smoking?” While it is very unlikely to actually hear a person say those words out loud, consider the truth: Out of the 6.7 billion people living in this world, 1.2 billion people smoke tobacco. That’s 18% of the world’s population. Could one out of five people be wrong, worldwide? Maybe I’m missing out on something here.

Despite its obvious health risks (is it really a risk or is it more of an eventual definite outcome?), despite an often negative social stigma, despite addiction, despite the smell a smoker becomes accustomed to yet non-smokers find offensive, despite the fact that cigarettes are the leading cause of house fires and fire related deaths, and despite the fact it’s an expensive habit, still for every five people in the world (and our country), one is a smoker. Seriously, I want to know what I’m not understanding. Surely I’m not seeing the whole picture.

Poorer households and developing countries are more likely to smoke than middle to high-income households and developed countries. What should I learn from that? Do cigarettes give people hope? Or do cigarettes help a person better deal with having less than others? If I suddenly began making half my income, it’s difficult for me to imagine spending more money on a habit that would decrease my overall health. I clearly need to get hip with the program.

I believe it is wrong for our government to ban the cultivation of any plant God put on this earth. So if every plant has a purpose, what can tobacco be used for, other than smoking? Growing up, my parents kept a package of tobacco for when any of us got a bee sting- when applied on the skin, it absorbs the poison.

Speaking of poison, tobacco also is a natural pesticide. Speaking of pesticides, my parents use NutraSweet and Sweet’N Low to pour on ant beds. It is a deathly substance to ants. Conveniently, the worker ants carry the poison throughout the colony, eventually killing them all off. Rule of thumb: If a substance easily kills insects, it’s a good indication the product is not intended for human consumption.

 

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Manspeak, Volume 7: Bromance

It’s not simply a fad. It’s much more complex than that. It’s not simply a gimmick to make more money in the theatres. It’s a clue that we as Americans have missing been out on something. The newfound popularity and acceptance of bromance is simply a realization that men were meant love each other, not just women.

America is good at teaching men masculinity: Rocky, Rambo, The Terminator, He-Man, GI Joe. It’s been ingrained in us our whole lives. We don’t have a problem accepting the fact that men are meant to be tough. Men are born to protect and defend. I think we do that pretty well. But while the bald eagle holds 13 arrows in one claw, he also holds 13 olive branches in the other.

Living overseas in Asia taught me a lot about American men. Though I was told that there were a lot of transvestites in Thailand, it wasn’t until my second summer over there that I was able to recognize them. I then came to the conclusion that the reason there are so many men living their lives as women there is because it is not culturally acceptable to be gay in Thailand, at all.

So when it’s not acceptable in a country at all to be gay (as compared to America where it’s not popular but there’s a growing level of acceptance), to take out the possibly of any men around being gay, it affects the cultural behavior of a nation. Men can be close without any possible thought of the other thinking he is sexually attracted to him. And even more relevant, there is not so much a possibly of awkwardness because of that. In the Philippine’s, it is common for men show their friendship publicly by holding hands.

But before there was Jackie Chan & Chris Tucker, before there was Owen Wilson & Ben Stiller, before there was Joey & Chandler, there was a time when men truly weren’t afraid to hug and be close. It simply symbolized their friendship but was nothing more.

My eyes were opened when I read Moby Dick in college. The 1851 novel was written in the American-Romanticism period, and while the theme of Christianity is more obvious than Season 5 of LOST, something else that really captured my attention and even became the topic of my final paper for that class was the bromantic relationship between the protagonist Ishmael (a 5’ 9” New England native) and his ship mate Queequeg (a 6’ 7” South Seas tribesman of mixed race).

The two men quickly become best friends and the narrator, Ishmael, is not reluctant to elaborate regarding his friendship. They simply slept in the same quarters and were close friends, but reading it with today’s mindset can make it easily be interpreted differently:

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”  -Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

Something else that really opened by eyes to bromance was when I started paying close attention to Jesus and His disciples in the New Testament. They were not hesitant to show physical affection for each other. At the Last Supper, look at Peter’s physical closeness to Jesus during dinner.

“Then, leaning back on Jesus’ breast, Peter said to Him, “Lord, who is it?”  -John 13:25

Imagine 12 dudes eating dinner in today’s society and one leans back on the other’s chest to ask him a question. Completely not acceptable.

Even this week I ran across something odd in the Old Testament as I was finishing up Genesis. This is where Jacob is blessing his sons before he dies:

“He called his son Joseph and said to him, ‘Now if I have found favor in your sight, please put your hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me. Please do not bury me in Egypt.”  -Genesis 47:29

In their culture, a son could make a vow to his father by placing his hand under his father’s thigh, or as my Bible’s study notes explain, it was a gentler way of saying his “procreative organ”. Think of how not acceptable that is today.

We’ve obviously come a long way since Biblical times regarding same-sex friendship and closeness. But even the culture that was present 158 years ago in Moby Dick paints a completely different picture compared to what is acceptable in American same-sex friendship today. The title of Moby Dick itself serves a perfect example of how far we’ve come. Add to that the fact that the story involves the close friendship of shipmates. That’s a lot of joke material for a 15 year-old boy to work with.

In fact, in recent decades there have been critics of Moby Dick claim that the book has homosexual undertones. Key phrase: “in recent decades”. For its time, the behavior found in the novel was not seen at all as a curious thing. It was normal back then.

I say it’s no wonder that today’s culture loves bromance. Men were made for close friendship with other men but are taught to hide their feelings because it’s not masculine to show them. When I think about it, several of my top favorite movies of all time have a heavy dose of bromance: Rocky 3, Plains Trains and Automobiles, Zoolander, Pineapple Express, Band of Brothers. And Hollywood knows it’s a winning formula.

The truth is, compare the box office sales of pretty much any Judd Apatow and/or Seth Rogan movie (bromantic comedies) to any romantic comedy made since 2005. Bromance wins every time. Romance, on the other hand, can be an unpredictable thing.

The best 3 minutes of recorded bromance, courtesy of 1982:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0qVUn4797g

All pictures with the “JHP” logo were taken by Joe Hendricks Photography:

Blog- www.photojoeblog.com

Website- www.joehendricks.com

 

Originally posted in April 2009 on facebook as “The History of Bromance”, which helped inspire the Manspeak series.

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New News

I live by an invisible list of things I will never do. Here is one of those things: “Never become involved in a quick sale unless I am the one pursuing the salesman or the store, not the other way around.” The fact is, calling in the next 10 minutes isn’t what entitles a person to a double order or a bonus gift, as they advertise in the commercial.

Those things are included either way. It’s just that the marketing department knows statistics show that the overwhelming majority of people who call in to order the product, do so in that time frame. It helps the fence riders to do business or get off the pot.

And that is just part of the dirty art of the Quick Sale. There is a reason certain salespeople are so aggressive. It usually is because of the high mark-up of the item. Or they are paid on commission. Or because the item plays on the potential customer’s emotions or wishful thinking.

If the “cure” for male baldness is ever found, there won’t need to be a commercial to advertise for it. Word will get around. Until then, there will always be desperate souls who respond to the infomercial and buy spray paint for their heads.

There is a shortage in the world for new information. People are desperate for it. On Monday the local news channel kept showing advertisements for the 10 O’ Clock News saying, “Find out how Kanye West may have hurt others besides Taylor Swift in the Nashville area…” When it finally aired, the story was simply that some girls from Taylor Swift’s high school didn’t like seeing their hometown hero deprived of her full award speech.

Two words: That is totally lame and no one cares.

I am supposed to be a Twitter fan. It is a great networking tool for writers, yes. But constant, pointless status updates totally annoy me. The deeper issue is this- I want to learn something new. My brain is a sponge for new perspectives and hidden agendas. Twitter isn’t the best place for that. It just constipates my flow of thoughts like the equivalent of junk food.

When I was a kid I remember one day asking my dad if the news reporters would ever run out of news to report. He said there would always be weather and crime, even if nothing else was going on. And that is true.

But what the world does run out of is interesting news. When Kanye West is the highlight of both the local and national news, it says something to me about what news really is. Just like the fact that not every summer has a huge blockbuster movie, not every week has a world-changing news story. Sometimes the news is simply a social blunder. It may appear petty on the surface, but if it is worth of capturing the attention of the entire nation for a week, it obviously holds some serious value.

Regardless, I took the bait. Especially once I heard what the President called him.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqtTESz24gU

And from there, I add to the noise, helping to put Kanye West into the same dreadful category as Paris Hilton, Octomom, and Jon & Kate. The category of “you’re so annoying, why are you everywhere I go?” which in turn sells the most magazines and gains the most clicks on website links.

“That which has been is that which will be and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. -King Solomon (Ecclesiastes)