Welcome to the Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. This Sunday we target: Comedy

  • Is the march through human history a tragedy or a comedy, or a combination, deserving of derisive and/or uproarious laughter?
  • American Thanksgiving over, if it ever should be, is it now an all-out dash to a good, old- fashioned, pagan holiday, season and spirit that morphed into Christmas (Festival of Nativity) in the fourth century by order of Pope Julius 1?
  • Were Americans hesitant or hasty when Christmas, ever popular, except when and where banned, became a Federal Holiday in 1870?
  • If Aristophanes, the creator of comedy, was walking the American, landscape today, would he feel estranged, at home, or maybe newly encouraged?
  • Would he surely be laughing out loud at the frailty (and failure) of sophist supremacists claiming intersectional correctness over everything from weaponized weather/climate change (with its witless wonks), to welcoming men into women’s sports (and locker rooms)?
  • Would stand-up comic/playwright Aristophanes embrace broad comedic themes reflecting human foibles, resilience, health and reason?
  • Do such, and did his, comedy themes include: Pillorying all aspect sex, politics, religion, ethnicity, race, pain, pleasure, pedantry, posturing plus production of loud and olfactory noises as precursor to personal effluvium excretion?
  • Is the latter an understandable, Buckeye reaction to the Michigan win over State yesterday?
  • If the subject is spared, is the story spoiled, punch lines petrified?
  • Can clever comedy, including the self-depreciating kind, carry us over the rough shoals of life and wash us up on the shores of laughter?
  • Because we’re human, are we all worthy targets, recognizing defects around and about, especially those we carry?
  • Is it preferable to LOL rather than cringe, stigmatize, get angry and cut off communication?
  • Better to remember Proverbs 17:22 and Bennet Cerf’s “Laughter is the Best Medicine?”
  • Can glad tidings from life’s comedy, even when they sting a bit, bring laughter and good health?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The answers and actions are yours.