I am propped against the faux-leather, or some other synthetic imitation of it, that skins the backseat of a taxi as we drive through Lisbon, Portugal. I watch the city disappear behind me in flashes of yellow, blue and pink. I sink lower into the seat until the window offers only a sliver of Lisbon, the rest is consumed by the back of my driver’s head. His eyes flick towards the rearview mirror, finding mine. He attempts to say something. I lean forward. “Huh?”
He mumbles again, slower this time.
“Sorry,” I say. “ ... can’t understand you.” He tries again, now using hand gestures. My eyes zero in on his hands, then dart to the steering wheel, apparently left to its own devices. Still, he persists. And still, I stare blankly at him.
Finally, he turns around. His eyes leave the road and meet mine without the mediation of the mirror. I open my mouth to tell him, once again, that I don’t understand. But before either of us can speak, we laugh. He laughs at me. I laugh at him. We laugh in Portuguese and in English at his increasingly desperate gestures and my increasingly useless apologies. We laugh at the absurdity of two strangers trying so hard to cross a distance of three feet. For the rest of the drive, we still have no language in common, but now the silence no longer feels like a failure.
This should, perhaps, be embarrassing to admit as someone who has spent four years studying communication, a pursuit that has required me to spend a considerable amount of time learning how people make themselves be understood.
Comedy seems to occupy a strange place in education. My education has been spent analyzing advertisements or learning the mechanics of persuasion. We are taught how to make people believe us, hire us, agree with us and buy things from us, and are taught to do these all really well. But making someone laugh is relegated to something less serious, even frivolous, as though humor was an interruption of meaningful communication rather than one of its forms. Except it is a meaningful form, so why not teach it at Cornell?
This isn’t to say that Cornell needs to produce the next generation of stand-up comedians — god forbid — but because being funny requires much of what we spend four years trying to learn elsewhere. A joke that fails teaches you, rather brutally, that communication isn’t determined by what you intended to say but by what someone else receives.
To me, comedy has always been a way of releasing pent-up anxiety about the difficult stuff that happens to all of us. There is a reason we reassure each other, “You’re going to look back at this one day and laugh.” Embedded in this cliché is the promise that laughter means we have made it to the other side. Ha! Being able to laugh is the first indication that something no longer owns you.
So, when I say comedy should be a class, I don’t want Cornell to teach people how to be funny. I’m not sure it can, and I am very sure I don’t want to sit through the consequences of trying. I mean that more people should be exposed to comedy as something worth taking seriously.
I fell in love with Saturday Night Live during a relatively tough period of my life. Every Sunday morning — because I am certainly not staying awake until 11:30 p.m. — I would wake up and turn on SNL. I would watch the cast take things that felt enormous and terrifying and make them into ridiculous bits, then clamp a hand over my mouth to muffle my shriek of laughter.
For those few minutes, whatever was happening in my own life became smaller too.
I don’t think comedy made any of it less painful; it didn’t fix anything. However, there is something powerful about taking the thing that saddens you or makes you feel powerless and finding a way to laugh around it. The situation itself hasn’t changed, but you have. For a moment, you are standing outside of it rather than in the eye of it.
If none of that is convincing enough, I can make the argument in a language Cornell students understand: comedy might help you land a job.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time here learning how to be employable. We case prep, coffee chat, study 400 printed investment banking questions and package them up to be brought to Mann Library. We attend information sessions that are meant to teach us how to behave in other information sessions. And through all of this, we are trying to become something that no résumé bullet point can quite capture: someone another person would actually enjoy working with. Let me tell you, comedy helps with that.
No, you should not walk into an interview with a prepared stand-up routine, and please, for the sake of recruiters everywhere, do not. Though, humor requires attention. You have to read the person across from you, understand when to speak and when to stop, know when something has landed and, perhaps most importantly, know when it absolutely has not. Comedy is an exercise in understanding other people, and being funny requires the same awareness that makes someone conversational.
We call these “soft skills,” a name that has always seemed strange to me for the things that determine whether anyone wants to talk to you. But of course, making yourself pleasant to talk to is a rather small use for comedy.
In Lisbon, laughter collapsed the space between me and a man whose words I could not understand. On Sunday mornings, SNL gave me just enough distance from the things I understood too well. That is what I would want a class on comedy to examine: why we laugh, what happens between people when we do and why, when life becomes particularly unfunny, we so often turn to comedy anyway.
Samantha Palombo is a member of the Class of 2027 in the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. She can be reached at sp2293@cornell.edu.
