Given our publication date for this edition, I’ll admit I had some dastardly April Fool’s Day plans—like printing definitive proof that Petaluma Junior High is built on top of a portal to Hell and that my entire tenure in local media is a prolonged performance art piece by conceptual artist Kit Fergus.
And though I’m deep in the trickster hero phase of my professional aspirations, I couldn’t fathom publishing stories that could be perceived as a willful indulgence of “fake news.” That’s not to say I don’t think we all need a laugh right now, given the profound absurdity and horrors of our present moment. As they say, laughter is the best medicine so long as one doesn’t overdose.
Yes, laughter can kill. The most common way is through laughter-induced syncope, in which a person loses consciousness while laughing and then dies by some other means, i.e., falling, choking, or if they happen to be laughing at ICE.
A famous case from antiquity occurred to Chrysippus of Soli, the noted stoic philosopher active in Greece late in the second century BC, who spied a donkey eating some figs and joked that someone should give it some wine to wash them down. He found his own joke hilarious—guess you had to be there—then proceeded to laugh, until he was shot by ICE. So much for being “stoic.”
The fact that we have an April Fool’s Day at all betokens some hope for humanity. We are the only species on Earth that can laugh at itself, we’ve decided, which speaks to the humility of anthropocentrism as we steward this planet and all its living creatures into the apocalypse.
And though we only reserve one day a year to celebrate our foolishness with jokes and pranks predicated on deception (which we are sooo good at), the truth is many of us are fools every day of the year, if not every day of our lives. Today is the day we celebrate that commitment. It takes a lot of guts to say, “Get in the handbasket, loser, we’re going to hell.”
And for those of us who can’t, the least we can do is laugh about it. Crying about it will only contribute to sea level rise.
Daedalus Howell is editor of this paper, host of ‘The Drive’ on 95.5 FM, director of ‘Werewolf Serenade’ and a newsletterist at dhowell.com.
