The Weight of Jokes and What Hides Beneath

Sometimes, it's easier to deflect. To make a joke. To redirect the focus, especially when the focus threatens to land somewhere uncomfortable, somewhere *real*. I noticed it a lot after Jacobs Pavilion. All those people, all that energy, all that… disappointment, maybe? I didn’t want to unpack it. It felt too big, too heavy. So I made a self-deprecating comment about my terrible stage presence to a friend, and suddenly, the weight felt a little lighter.

It’s not always a conscious choice. It’s less about *deciding* to be funny and more about a reflex, a default setting. Like when my blog post went up after the show. Twenty-seven people read it. Twenty-seven. It should have felt like a failure. Logically, it *was* a small audience. But I didn't really process that. I just immediately started finding things to joke about - the awkward phrasing, the amateurish formatting, the sheer absurdity of putting myself out there. It was safer than acknowledging the actual feeling underneath.

My mom always said I was a “light” person. Meaning, I didn’t dwell. I didn’t get bogged down. Which, on the surface, sounds lovely. Positive. But I’m starting to suspect that it meant something else entirely. It meant I was good at pushing things down. At compartmentalizing. At building walls of humor to keep the difficult stuff out. It’s a useful skill, I guess, in some situations. You learn to navigate conversations when you don’t quite understand what’s going on.

It’s not that I’m incapable of feeling things deeply. I absolutely am. There are times, usually late at night, when the surface cracks and the real stuff bleeds through. A memory, a song, a certain quality of light… and suddenly, I’m overwhelmed with a sadness that feels ancient and vast. And then I scramble for a joke, a distraction, *anything* to stop the feeling from consuming me.

I remember when I was younger, during that stretch of time after the news, everyone seemed to be searching for ways to process it. Comedians started incorporating the events into their routines, and suddenly, it felt okay to laugh. It felt necessary, even. Like, if we didn't find a way to find levity, we would all just drown. Maybe that's what I'm doing now, in my own, smaller way. Building a raft of jokes to keep myself afloat.

There’s a certain creativity involved, I think, in crafting these defenses. It takes a degree of imagination to consistently redirect a conversation, to transform a painful experience into something palatable, something shareable. It's a twisted form of artistry, really. I wonder if that’s why some people are drawn to creative pursuits. Not necessarily as a means of expressing something, but as a way of *avoiding* something.

The problem, I’m beginning to see, isn’t the humor itself. It’s the reliance on it. The constant need to deflect. It’s the fear of what might surface if I allowed myself to feel the full weight of things. I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe it’s about slowly, deliberately, letting those walls down. Letting the sadness in. It's going to be messy. Probably awkward. Definitely uncomfortable.

But maybe, just maybe, it will be real. And real, even when it hurts, is a lot better than a carefully constructed joke. I'll probably still make jokes, though. That’s just who I am. But I hope, eventually, they’ll be layered with something else too. Something honest.