Laughter is the Best Weapon

You’ve heard it your whole life: “Laughter is the best medicine.”

It’s not a Hallmark card. It’s Scripture. Proverbs 17:22: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Dead true. If you cannot look at the circus of modern life and laugh, you will eventually break. Notice the men who go soft first are the ones who forgot how to mock the absurd.

But laughter is not just medicine. It is a weapon.

You need laughter in your quiver when you walk the frontier of work, business, and the endless parade of people who should never have been given a microphone, a title, or a standing.

In an abhorrent culmination of a certain producer’s can’t-make-a-decision track-count nightmare scenario, we’ve got a mix rolling on the console stuffed with way too much of everything. I’m pushing my Pro Tools rig to the max and we have to pull in a Logic rig to handle some of the track count. We have an entire SSL G+ chock-full of inputs across the main faders and the smaller monitor faders as well. The entire gamut here—twelve tracks of guitar, each mic’d with four mics—that’s 48 tracks just for the guitar sounds. We have drum tracks galore—including a mic inside the toaster oven in the studio lounge for vibe, leaving the door open so the drums could bleed into whatever reason for a microphone they dreamt up in there. String passes that have sixteen tracks for each pass, stacked with four passes—that’s 64 tracks just for the string sound. Layers upon layers of keyboard madness, percussion, bips and boops, and then around 40 tracks of vocal madness on top of it all. It’s a mess that takes three mega twelve-hour days to decipher as the producer begins to realize the error of his ways. He thought we’d knock this thing out in three or four hours, tops.

Near the end of our mixing marathon, the label dispatches a promotions guy for a listen—and ostensibly sign-off authority on the mix. And when I say a promotions guy, I mean the guy who designs cardboard end-caps for record stores—possibly a creative soul in his own lane, but light-years removed from anything resembling music-making. No business in a control room, and yet here he sits.

We play the mix. It’s horrendous. He leans in with brow furrowed, doing his best impression of a man in complete authority of the madness pouring out of the speakers—a track overstuffed like an audio hoarder’s garage. As the cacophony finally fades, our intrepid listener swivels toward the room and kicks off with something genuinely bizarre:

“Do you know what’s going to be really, really big this year?”

What, are we talking shoes and fall fashion trends now?

He leans in further, dead serious, and drops the bomb:

“BAGPIPES. This track needs BAGPIPES. They’re going to be huge this year!”

The room goes church-silent. The artist shifts in his chair like his ass just caught fire. The producer stands stoic and quizzical—quite possibly considering the idea as a worthy addition to his litany of poor decision-making to date. Me? I go straight for weapons-grade laughter. I know full well this lunatic isn’t joking, but I decide that the room’s best chance of survival is to convince him that he is, indeed, joking. I slap my knee hard and howl, “Oh man… bagpipes… Dude, you had me for a second! I actually thought you were serious! Bagpipes—nice one! That is HILARIOUS!” I throw a glance at the artist and producer, dragging them onto my bandwagon. “Can you imagine bagpipes on this track? Dear Lord. Nightmare fuel. This guy got me good! Did y’all think he was serious too?” They pile on with enough uncomfortable chuckling to finish the job—burying the poor man’s bagpipe dream in a mass grave of forced hilarity.

Mr. Promotions Man, sensing defeat, slinks out of the room like a dog caught eating a Thanksgiving turkey. As we watch his taillights disappear out of the parking lot, the producer leans over toward me. “Dude, I think he was serious about the bagpipes.”

I look back, slap him on the shoulder and nod. “Dead serious.”

I’m working at Apple, where I dutifully arrive daily at 8 am for my shift. Though I sold the ass-end out of the place, I was happy to be compensated hourly and not on commission. It just made the working environment cleaner and easier. Arriving at 8 am, however, meant we’d sometimes have to wait for a manager to arrive, unlock the door, and let us in. ***Sometimes this manager arrival was an on-time 7:55, but other times 8:03, 8:05, maybe 8:06 on a very rare occasion.

I never thought much about it - everyone was there, we all filed in, and we all got to work. The Business Team I led was always the #1 in our market, always outperforming the other 32 stores that made up the market’s set of stores.

Anywhooo… one day a manager (there are 5 or 6 managers at the store) comes into my office. This was a young-buck kid who’d just been promoted to manager - his name was Billy, and I always called him Billy the Kid. He’s obviously bored this particular day and looking for things to do, so he interrupts my important work to talk about the fact that I often arrive a few minutes late in the mornings. ***Sometimes my arrival was an on-time 7:55, but other times 8:03, 8:05, maybe 8:06 on a very rare occasion. (see above).

The dude is being serious. Dead serious. Me? I go straight for weapons-grade laughter. I know full well this lunatic isn’t joking, but I decide that my best chance of survival is to convince him that he is, indeed, joking. I slap my knee hard and howl, “Oh man… Dude, you had me for a second! I actually thought you were serious! Late? Three minutes, five minutes late?—Nice one! That is HILARIOUS! Dude, I have a call with a client here soon that I’m prepping for; do you mind closing my door on the way out?”

Mr. Manager Man, sensing defeat, rises slowly out of the chair and slinks out of the door behind him - leaving my office with a blank stare, and not quite knowing what just hit him as I continue my guffawing.

I am the president of our HOA, and a lady has come to an HOA meeting to complain about the way the grass in our common area fields is being mowed. She has a picture of her shoes covered with grass, and she’s saying, “This is what happens to my shoes when I walk through the grass. They get covered with grass!”

This lady is being serious. Dead serious. Me? I go straight for weapons-grade laughter. I know full well this lunatic isn’t joking, but I decide that the room’s best chance of survival is to convince her that she is, indeed, joking. I slap my knee hard and howl, “Oh wow… Lady, you had me for a second! I actually thought you were serious! Grass on our shoes from walking through grass?—Nice one! That is HILARIOUS!” I throw a glance around the room, dragging the rest of the HOA Board onto my bandwagon. “Can you imagine grass on your shoes after walking through grass? Dear Lord. Nightmare fuel. She got me good! Did y’all think she was serious too?” They pile on with enough uncomfortable chuckling to finish the job—burying the poor lady’s grass problems in a mass grave of forced hilarity.

Miss Grassy Shoes, sensing defeat, slinks out of the room. As we watch her taillights disappear out of the parking lot, a fellow board member leans over toward me. “Dude, I think he was serious about the grass.”

I look back, slap him on the shoulder and nod. “Dead serious.”

In each of these instances, there is no reasoning with the perpetrators. There is no way to stoop down to this level of thinking, this absurdity of their banal and facile reality. Don’t even try; don’t waste your time. There is no way to have a conversation where you can even align with this low-level, futile thinking. Do not attempt to even get down to that level. The danger of arguing with an idiot is they have far more practice at being an idiot than you do.

No, the only thing you can give them is that which they deserve. Laugh them the hell out of the room!

For this strategy to be successful, you must wholesale commit to the bit. It won’t be easy. It will feel awkward, but it’s supposed to - for the other guy. You cannot show weakness - once you fire off the laughter, you’re committed. You’re not showing empathy here; you are slamming the door in the face of abject stupidity. Do not let your target get a word in anywhere. You’re ending the conversation with your bit, and moving on. It’s supposed to feel brutal. But it’s fighting fire with fire - brutal stupidity with the brutal response it deserves.

The laughter is not cruelty for its own sake. It is the sound of a man refusing to be drafted into another person’s delusion - the practical application of the dichotomy of control in real time.

The dichotomy of control is the core Stoic split: What is up to you. What is not.

• Up to you: your judgments, your responses, your character, the stories you tell yourself about what just happened.

• Not up to you: other people’s opinions, their stupidity, their theories, their feelings.

Most men spend their lives trying to control the second category and neglect the first. That is how they end up enslaved - their time spent angry at fools, exhausted by arguments that were never winnable, drafted into someone else’s delusion.

Practical application of the dichotomy of control in real time means you do not wait for a lengthy debate, a mindless hearing, or some journal entry on the topic at hand. You execute the split the second the absurdity appears.

The promotions guy says “bagpipes”; the manager marks time entries that aren’t even yours; a lady walks through the grass and emerges upset about the grass.

Your move is not to explain why these people are insane. That would be trying to control others.

Your move is to decide, instantly, that this insanity has no place in your own mind. You laugh, and you end it. And then you return to the state of being that is actually yours.

Laughter, in that moment, is not performance. It’s not cruelty. It is the clean refusal to hand over the only thing that belongs to you - your freedom. You keep the helm and stay free.

That is the dichotomy of control.

You know where to find me,

Todd