Just a note on Williams and his humor.-Ron Price, Australia
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MAKE ‘EM LAUGH

I’d had a long day. I’d had my evening sleep to recover from the demands of the day on my psyche. Even though I have now been retired from the anxieties of a job for more than a decade(1999 to 2011) and am in what is sometimes called the evening of my life, my psyche can be and is often stretched to its limit without too much trouble.

By midnight I’ve nearly always had a minimum of at least four hours of reading and research, writing and editing---and sometimes as many as eight. As I consumed by late-night snack, I chanced upon an ABC2 television program entitled: Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America. It was sub-titled Would Ya Hit a Guy with Glasses?/Nerds, Jerks & Oddballs.1

From the early pioneers to the most biting satire on television today, this TV program featured some of the funniest moments in American entertainment including: Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, Cheech and Chong, Woody Allen, Steve Martin and Robin Williams. Most of this comedy was on the periphery of my life, although the funny-side of life moved to the centre as I moved from Canada to Australia, and from young to late adulthood, from the age of 20 to 65. -Ron Price with thanks to 1ABC2, 11:40pm - 12:38am, Saturday, 25 June 2011.

I did not really get into laughing
until I moved to Australia where
laugher is just about compulsory
with that cynical-beneath-surface
mentality that I have come to see
as part of a survival kit. Humour
is the main thing I’ve learned in the
last 40 years living here Downunder.

It helps to give a balance to serious
stuff that has been bread-and-butter
for me in the arts and sciences away
back---as far I can remember---after
playing and having fun occupied my
time in those childhood years, and as
I got into religion1 and politics2 by a
series of sensible & insensible degrees
from my adolescent years to those of my
young adulthood: twenty to forty years old.

1 My parents, especially my mother, had eclectic religious tastes and by the time I was 15 I had attended many religious groups and joined the Baha’i Faith.
2 My interest in politics became, by my mid-teens, non-partisan, having been inoculated against party politics by the experience of having political meetings in our home. The Baha’i Faith was a non-partisan religion. My study of politics at university was mainly academic as was my teaching of the subject from the 1970s to the 2000s.

Ron Price
26 June 2011
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Robin Williams's humor was often conveyed with such speed....and so I comment below.....
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A REMAKE

The year I became a Baha’i, 1959, a Richard Condon published a novel called The Manchurian Candidate. It was made into a film by the same name in 1962, the year my travelling-pioneering life began. However much the film was based on Cold War themes, the story itself was utterly implausible. But the narrative is conveyed with such speed, with a heightened visual style, with humour and conviction, with a twisting, surrealistic and fragmented plot, with stars like Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra who said he was at the height of his acting career in 1962, and with such a delightful and sophisticated satire that the movie leaves one wondering that, however implausible the story may be, day-to-day politics is even more implausible and noone should take the world of partisan politics at all seriously.-Ron Price with thanks to Roger Ebert, “The Manchurian Candidate,” Chicago Sun-Times.com, December 7, 2003.

No brainwashed sleeper was I
back in ’62 in some vicious satire,
political thriller for the big-screen.
There were few laughs then trying
as I was to get my unscripted, flawed
and utterly plausible life programmed
into life’s great complex story.

They remade that thriller,1 though,
and by 2004 I too had been remade,
not with a new 5.1 Dolby sound mix
and anamorphic widescreen transfer,2
but with life’s inexorable bone-shifting
moves: two marriages, breakdowns,
thirty years teaching thousands:
Eskimos, Aboriginals and people
whose lives were also shifting
like sand under their feet as they
tried to get a fix on existence.

And so my life, not reissued by MGM
on DVD with Denzel Washington,
but reconstituted, this time with
the high tension and drama softened
with age, with my Cold War behind me
and a new terror, for the most part,
only watched on TV and part of a process
which all the events of our history, our time,
were giving rise to: the transformation
of society far beyond our present capacity
to ever understand its twistings and turnings.

1 The film The Manchurian Candidate(1962) was remade in 2004.
2 See The Manchurian Candidate, Special Edition, 1962, Amazon.comVD

Ron Price
December 17 2004