The other week I was flipping through the channels and ended up watching Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  It premiered just in 1963, a year before I was born, and it was one of my first memories of seeing a comedy that wasn't meant for kids.  In some ways I think it framed the way I saw and assimilated the "madness" around me as I grew up (preparing me to see Monty Python and the Holy Grail  as the summation of what it all means).  And in that I could spend a few blogs detailing the progression from that to now.

Of course, we see what we see (and don't see what we don't see) as a consequence of everything else that we are experiencing.  And re-watching It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World the other week came through the Newtown/Gun Debate matrix.

What stands out to me in this whole debate is our society / culture confrontation with the expression of violence.  We see such expressions everyday.  Some of them are artistic.  Others are verbal, maybe the parent scolding and disciplining the unruly child on the bus, and sometimes it turns physical.  Others are merely reports of something distant like a drone attack on a Middle Eastern village.  And then there are the subtle Madison Avenue advertisements that embrace violence toward women.

I could go on.  Our cultural discourse is saturated with violence.  It defines in large measure who we are, if not just by our continued resistance to be defined by it.  But whether one embraces it, resists it, or some mixture of the two, it is there.

To the point where one comes to see it not as a cultural manifestation, but a manifestation of what it means to be human. 

Which brings us back to It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  The fundamental premise that propels the story, that keeps the humor going, and yet allows for a true pathos to creep in, is that it is the flaw in our human nature that turns otherwise basically decent people into violent maniacs.

Basically decent people.  It is the category we for the most part put ourselves.  We're not perfect, and over the years we have done things that have hurt others, but overall we are basically decent.  We are not Charles Manson, or James Holmes, or Ted Bundy, or Adam Lanza.

And yet given the right temptation, say the potential of $350,000 in 1963 (which adjusted for inflation would be $2,626,075 in 2012) our decency, our civilized nature, drops away and we become something less than decent.

The brilliance of a movie like It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World is that it allows us to see this reflection of ourselves without it being a traumatic event.  We can laugh at Jonathan Winters enough that we can let go of the deeper, more depressing thought.   Yet that thought still gets in there, so while leave the theater (or turn the channel) with an amused feeling, later that night we might catch that lingering thought that it could so easily have been us racing the others for the chance to be sole owner of the booty.

One weekend many years ago, driving around doing errands, during some NPR show someone made the comment that in comedy somebody always gets hurt in the punch line.  And in this way it is the same as tragedy.  Someone else (Kafka?) said that comedy was tragedy with the meaningfulness ripped out.

Maybe it was Kundera talking about Kafka.  One of those significant moments in my life was picking up Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as a teenager.  One of the tidbits was an interview with Kundera that was added to the edition I bought, during which we discussed  the laughter of angels and the laughter of the devil. 

The laughter of angels was the laughter of a child running through a field of flowers.  The laughter of the devil was the laughter that comes when a hat falls off someone's head during a funeral and lands on the coffin.  The laughter of the devil is the laughter that comes when life has its meaning taken away.  Which is not the same as life not having no meaning to start with. 

We laugh to forget, but the deep laughter means we can't forget.  Only that we allow the discomfort of the dark side of our nature to be momentarily embraced in a way that doesn't ruin the day.

One of the things that caught my attention watch It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World this time was one of the key reasons that Captain T.G. Culpeper played by Spence Tracey decided to steal the loot was that he frustrated the Mayor would not increase his pension that hadn't seen a raise in sometime.  It is another variation on age old theme of "I deserve more from life than what I've gotten."

In fact a central facet of the bickering between the whole cast of characters was around what was defined one's fair entitlement.  It was their inability to achieve a consensus on how the treasure should be fairly divided between them that led to the whole fiasco. 

Now we have people bickering over what size of clip they are entitled to.  Hilarity ensues.

At this point, there are too many threads streaming out in my head on this topic that I will just end this blog with a song.