Comic relief

Comic relief
The return of laughter is a good sign

January 15, 2002

When the leader of the free world, watching football on television, swallows a pretzel the wrong way, faints and falls from the sofa, it’s news.

There’s no way around that, even when the citizens of that free world might prefer to maintain the dignity of their chief. President Bush could not have taken a few days from his routine, nor could he have refused an explanation to the press and the public about why he looks as though someone had punched him on the cheekbone. Neither can the media ignore the incident, partly because Americans deserve to know and partly because, if the rather prosaic truth isn’t told, the story that goes around is likely to be more fiction than fact. The possibilities for embellishing on the evidence of a bruised face are nearly endless.

Now that it’s all out in the open, we’ll be treated to mildly interesting physiological information explaining how a pretzel can fell a president, albeit temporarily. If it ever happens again, we’ll all be experts. On top of that privilege, we’ll also be treated to so many jokes that no one in the United States will want to eat pretzels for months. No late-night television show, no bar conversation, no water-cooler interlude will be complete without at least one reference to pretzels.

And that’s not a bad thing.

We haven’t had much to laugh over lately. After Sept. 11, our mindsets cycled from disbelief to horror to numbness and then anger. The jokes that did crop up, as people tried to deal with the changes wrought on their world view, were in questionable taste and few of us could summon more than a weak chuckle.

Humor is an important tool in dealing with stress, though. Laughter is good medicine, and the more dire the situation, the more essential it is to find appropriate ways of coping. In September, no one could have imagined laughing at the president. By October, it had become clear that criticizing the administration, let alone mocking it, wasn’t acceptable in a time of crisis. We all had to pull together, we were told; otherwise evil would win.

But somehow life went on. We began to understand that the War on Terror wasn’t going to be over by Christmas. There was the economy to think of, and then Enron, and the bowl games, and pretty soon we’d adjusted to the new normality. A few grins began appearing, and eventually some full-blown belly laughs escaped.

The president’s pretzel problem offers the perfect target. It’s neither political nor personal, and it really is funny. There was the president of the United States of America, not hiding in some undisclosed secure location but lounging on a White House sofa watching a football game on the tube. That’s a reassuring picture.

This is America, after all — a place in which ordinary citizens can watch the same ballgames and eat the same pretzels as the president. Right now, we need to be reminded of that, just as George W. Bush needed to be reminded to chew his food carefully. Only in America!