I heard all about what made the ancient Romans laugh (an inordinate amount of what were essentially absent-minded professor jokes), where Wittgenstein and Buster Keaton converge, the bathroom habits of insects, and Jewish humor. I heard clips of what is considered to be classic comedy, saw unreal films made and animated by Bob Sabiston, witnessed people actually slapping their knees while experiencing John Hodgman’s charmingly eloquent bullshit, and others share stories about themselves without the least bit of encouragement simply to pass the time while waiting in line to have a book signed.

It was such a bustling couple of weeks that I really didn’t have much time to do any actual and focused thinking about laughter, though. In hindsight and when I seriously put my mind to it (not necessarily easy for me), I began to consciously appreciate just how loaded laughter is, how there is a laugh for every emotion, how easily and naturally laughter is used to cover embarrassment, anger, self pity, contempt, all of which had passed through my thoughts at various times throughout my life, but had never featured prominently for any appreciable amount of time.

Though nearly every event I attended at the festival was enthralling (I’ll admit: the lectures I went to at the Chicago Temple were not easy for me; I was conditioned at an early age to be bored and distracted in churches, largely due to the fact that all of the services I attended as a kid were in Greek, and though the music of the language and the cantors on the altar still send a shiver along my spine, pale English in the echoing cavern of a sanctuary puts me straight to sleep. On top of that, I also have a bit of residual anxiety in churches because, as a kid, I thought I was the Antichrist. I thought this for two reasons. One, being that my name is Damien and I was born the same year that The Omen was released, my older brothers used to sit on my chest and pin my arms down with their legs while ruffling through my hair to find the 666 that they pretended was sure to be there. Two, we didn’t eat breakfast before going to church because communion had to be taken on an empty stomach (Wine first thing in the morning and I managed to avoid having a drinking problem. Up to this point, anyway.), and the combination of no food in the belly and sitting for what seemed like an eternity in the hot airless church would cause me to get light-headed. The color would completely drain from my face, I’d break out in a cold sweat, and get dizzy. At age eight, this seemed like exactly the kind of thing that would happen to the Antichrist in the house of god. I’d have to go downstairs into the bathroom and rest my cheek on the cool tile of the wall until everything stopped spinning. These were some of the easier moments of my childhood.), I simply had trouble sustaining thoughts about laughter once the events concluded. It was easy to be there, to be present, to forget your troubles while listening to some first-rate talent regale you with some first-rate story which, even if it might have been about hardship or of an entirely depressing nature, was still told by a professional, adept in the culture of laughter and humor, someone who just knows how to make you laugh and/or wonder, jaw dropped, at the amazingness of whatever it is they have to say.

But stepping back onto Chicago’s November street of reality, life was waiting, with its debt and collection agency phone calls, with its potholes of governmental carelessness and nightmarishly real robotmonster called Sarah Palin, with its never-ending bad news about teen killers, terrorist trials, celebrity scandals, the capitalist ruling class, holiday consumer frenzies, and who gives a fuck what else. Incessantly. Everywhere. Even the buses bark at you with their ultra-bright animated advertising video boards. (Yes I’ll say it: I’m so sick of advertising. Why is it that I can’t walk through the Jackson red-to-blue line tunnel without being bombarded every three paces by ads for Flip? Jesus Fucking Christ. Is it really that amazing?)

(I actually consider myself to be an incredibly fortunate person in that I have so much to be happy and laugh about. In fact, my life is filled with laughter, these small but constant injections of pure uncut joy which keep me from jumping out the 12th-floor window of my shitty day job. But there is so much data constantly trying to blot out everything that exists apart from itself, so much that just isn’t funny, isn’t healthy, isn’t productive, isn’t real; It’s impossible to avoid and maybe naïve to want to avoid it; but despite that, I don’t like it in my face. I understand that it’s a part of us and not likely to go anywhere, but I don’t like it.)

One of the things brought most prominently to the front of my thoughts while attending the Humanities Festival was humanity itself, in all its excellence and brokenness, as I experience it on the street and in culture from all over the world. When I think about all that we’ve accomplished as a humanity, as a collective force existing in time, I really can’t help but laugh. We’ve done such great things, from gaining awareness of the stars to navigating by them, from defining diseases to curing them, from Harry Potter to Twilight. And the potential for further greatness seems exponentially increased by how small the world has become, by how quickly we can communicate our discoveries, our inspirations, our trials, our hopes. Whenever I see something utterly amazing or mind boggling, I just laugh. Not so much a self-satisfied laughter, but I won’t deny some small bit of pride in being related to what is amazing or mind boggling by sheer virtue of the fact that I am also a part of this humanity. It feels great to be a part of this strange thing, this thing I will never understand.

The flip side, of course, the very dark, drastic, looming flip side, is our equally amazing and mind boggling capacity for self destruction. And though that, too, sometimes makes me laugh – the absurdity of what we destroy and how freely we destroy it, and perhaps more importantly how blind we chose to be to that destruction – our failures tend to inspire deep disappointment, depression, and hopelessness which no broad-smiling and charming politician will ever be able to negate. It all seems so tragic so much of the time, and it’s so hard to know where to go and what to do if you’re of the mind to commit yourself to altering the course of that tragedy, futile as it tends to feel. But humanity seems to be worth it. In my naïve, ultra-optimistic fantasy, anyway.

It certainly takes more than two weeks of listening to people at the Humanities Festival to encourage a little hope in the future, but listening to those people definitely helps remind me of what is at stake: the absolutely beautiful amazingness of humanity. And laughter, though sometimes hard to come by and harder to hold on to, is certainly a useful tool to wield against the end of the world which maybe only John Cusack can save us from.

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Matt Groening and Lynda Barry circa 1984 by Michael Sepcot.

Guest post by Damien James

In the brief Chicago Humanities Festival preview posted a couple of weeks ago, I listed what I hoped would be some highlights, and I wanted to take a moment now that the festival is about halfway through its run to tell you about two events I recently attended so you get a picture—maybe fleeting—of how this years programming is meeting my admittedly high expectations.

In the near future I’ll share more about specific events as well as thoughts on the festival theme—laughter—with the intention of communicating how important the Humanities Festival has been for me, maybe how important it is to the city itself, and possibly beyond. It’s also my hope that it will become important to you, if it isn’t already. After all, each of us is a part of the greater festival of humanities as it plays out in our own lives every day, in the choices we make which not only effect ourselves, but everyone in our local and even global community.

And if this happens to be your city, the excellence of CHF earns you some bragging rights. Privatized parking meters, bogus mayoral claims of how green Chicago is, Land of the Lost-sized pot holes and shitty CTA service, our former governor’s “reality” TV career, and our failure (thank Jesus) to win the Olympic bid are not the only things we have going for us…

Chicagoan Harold Ramis was the first presenter I saw, and we should all be lucky enough to have so much to laugh about at 65 years old. I told him after his presentation at the Thorne Auditorium that he seemed to be an incredibly happy guy. He took a beat before responding and said, “I’m an actor.” Reading this on the screen, one can easily interpret those three words as “Of course I’m happy! And famous! And rich! And on my way to Spiaggia! Have you ever had their Gamberi e polenta al forno con erbe cipollinariccio di mare e cavaile? It’s fucking delicious!”

What you missed by not actually seeing and hearing him, however, was how easily his eyes and voice conveyed the same bittersweetness as when, answering a question from the audience as to what he would most like to accomplish at this point in his life, he said, “This is gonna sound sappy, but I’d just like to have a successful marriage.”

90 minutes with the writer/director/actor disappeared loudly and instantly as laughter spread itself across the spectrum of emotion while Ramis shared clips and anecdotes from his favorites, bouncing off the brilliant surfaces of the Marx Brothers in all their surrealist glory (this was the first time I had ever seen them on the big screen, which enhanced their funny ten-fold; As a kid, Ramis wanted to be both Groucho and Harpo), Cary Grant in Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace, Monty Python and their heady existentialism, Woody Allen and his flawless ability to embody the deep-seeded angst we all experience at least a thousand times (I’m underestimating) in our lives, Dr. Strangelove, Preston Sturges, the Coen brothers, and many more. It was as entertaining to watch Ramis laughing at the clips he shared as the clips were themselves.

He went from self-effacing to self-aggrandizing as if on cue and drew out delight at each step, boasting ownership of “four percent of AFI’s top 100 funniest films,” and admitting that he went to Hollywood to get laid. He told unexpected stories (“My wife said that for her fiftieth birthday she wanted to meet the Dalai Lama, so I called some friends in Glencoe…” They did in fact meet him, though Ramis was fairly certain that the Dalai Lama had never seen Caddyshack.), and spoke about the days leading up to The Second City, when Mike Nichols and Elaine May were at The Compass doing what had never been done before, his introduction to Billy Murray (“the funniest peanut vendor you could ever meet”), his musical history at the Old Town School of Folk as kid, and how he went into college like John Kennedy and came out like John Lennon. Even if you don’t care for some (or any) of Ramis’ films—though is there really anyone who doesn’t like Ghostbusters at least a little bit?—it was impossible not to be charmed by his enthusiasm and candor. Ramis closed with a scene from Monty Python in which a sing-along and group whistling was taken up to cheer Christ while crucified.

Just 48 hours later, with equal candor and a thick sloppy ladling of playful insanity, Matt Groening and Lynda Barry took the stage at the UIC Forum on 725 West Roosevelt, where both were hilarious, inspiring, and incredibly goddamn smart. Before they were introduced, it was said that the attendance for their presentation was the highest in CHF history. Sitting next to me was Chris Ware, who simultaneously looked around the Wal-Mart-esque room with it’s AC-lined high ceilings, institutional paint, and florescent lighting, and joked (I think) in his oddly compelling self-loathing-laced voice, “This place is just horrible. I feel like they’re going to take us all on stage and execute us.”

Regardless, the place was packed, and it was one of the more diverse crowds I’ve seen in four years of attending CHF events, which seem to draw more from middle-aged Northshore affluence than the richness of the inner-city student and working class. Why that is I am still not certain.

To claps and shouts, Matt and Lynda began. The two have such a deep history and palpable affection for each other that their conversation was completely engaging, like sitting at the adult table with older siblings you adore as they tell stories of their most outlandish drinking games, yet they carried with them the weight of decades of familiarity. They emphatically traded tales about their family histories, how they were both directly influenced by the mottos of their fathers (for Lynda: “There’s no problem too big to run away from;” for Matt: “If you’re going to do something, overdo it.”), how they met at Evergreen State College, their humble beginnings as a writer/chauffeur and a nude artists model, respectively, and the myriad ups and downs of living off creativity and the mostly constant struggle of trying to make it as cartoonists in the adult world, which is, as Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer said, “not a job for grown-ups.”

Lynda’s facial expressions and hand gestures were exclamation points on her punch lines. “Good art and good images,” she said wide-eyed and nodding as if to slow children she none the less loved dearly, “keep you from killing yourself and others!” Matt’s comic dialogs from his sons (“Listening to my kids was a great way to make weekly deadlines. At least until they got old enough that they no longer wanted to cooperate.”) as read by he and Lynda were met with those deep belly laughs that make your cheeks and crows feet hurt. During a clip of The Simpsons, someone even screamed.

Matt and Lynda made each other laugh, too, despite the fact, or because of, how much they admittedly annoy each other. Matt boyishly blushed at times, which Lynda seemed to savor. “He even asked me to marry him once,” she said, Matt looking down at the table, reddening. “He didn’t mean it.” The two had such chemistry on stage that it was easy to imagine them together, maybe just as easy to imagine what a disaster it could have been.

Groening and Barry spoke only briefly on the importance of each others work, but even that was unnecessary. They were ushered off stage by a standing ovation. People knew they were in the presence of greatness. I only say that because some of them said as much out loud. I might not have held the same opinion before hearing the two artists speak, but after, I felt the same way. Matt Groening and Lynda Barry weren’t trying to, but they convinced me.

That you can do what you love and maybe carve out a little place for yourself, despite how difficult it may be at times, is something every artist should hear and remember, not that carving out a place for yourself should ever be the motivation. Love for what you’re doing is the only motivation which is self sustaining. The decades of experience Groening and Barry shared with CHF patrons is proof.

CHF runs through November 15th. Get ticket info at: http://www.chicagohumanities.org/

Damien James is a self-taught artist and writer living (barely) and working (constantly) in Chicago. He has contributed to Chicago Reader, New City, Saatchi Gallery Online, Art Voices, and the general goodwill of mankind, among other things. His art has been seen in Chicago’s Around the Coyote Gallery, Brooklyn’s 3rd Ward Gallery with Art House Co-op’s Sketchbook Project, various apartments in Berlin, London, and a tiny village in Romania.

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The Chicago Humanities Festival has just kick-started it’s 20^th anniversary programming with the theme of Laughter. “Not Happiness, mind you,” writes the Festival’s artistic director Lawrence Weschler. “Happiness is smug and bland and self-satisfied. Laughter, on the other hand, runs the gamut: from blithe to bitter, raucous to serious, fond to angry,” and so on.

Spread out in venues across the city, the Chicago Humanities Festival will giddily dance through Laughter in all its permutations with the same expansive worldview and near-reckless abandon it has brought to the table since 1989, when Richard Franke got the bright idea to bring intellectually stimulating, entertaining, and entirely accessible lectures, performances, and all-around amazingness to our Midwestern metropolis.

On hand will be such distinguished guests as Harold Ramis (sharing some of his favorite funny moments in cinema), Matt Groening in conversation with Lynda Barry, Pulitzer Prize-winner Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize-coveter John Hodgman, Chris Ware and his beautifully sad art, Bob Sabiston (of Waking Life fame), the Neo Futurists, Chicago Reader’s Michael Miner, the Guerrilla Girls, and 151 other presenters that you’ll probably want to see.

CHF has literally changed peoples lives, my own included, and I’ll be attending from now through mid-November and sharing some of my experiences with you. Maybe this year I’ll explode.

The Festival runs through November 14th. For more info and tickets, visit http://www.chicagohumanities.org/.

Damien James is a self-taught artist and writer living (barely) and working (constantly) in Chicago. He has contributed to Chicago Reader, New City, Saatchi Gallery Online, Art Voices, and the general goodwill of mankind, among other things. His art has been seen in Chicago’s Around the Coyote Gallery, Brooklyn’s 3^rd Ward Gallery with Art House Co-op’s Sketchbook Project, various apartments in Berlin, London, and a tiny village in Romania.

Without the good sense and inspiration of his paramour, Cassandra, he would most likely be a small blot of dirt about to be washed away by an only slightly larger puddle of inky water in some back alley.

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• Damien James on the Chicago Humanities Festival
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• Half the sky, and just a bit more of your attention.