Music, Comedy & the Importance of Being Entertained
Some reflections as a new project takes flight.
It has been a more reflective week at Vibes HQ in London. We call it half-term but it’s our October break, Halloween and Guy Fawkes’ Night all in the same week. Guy once disagreed so strongly with the British government that he tried to blow up Parliament from the inside with barrels of gunpowder.
In true British fashion we decided to remember him, of all the people we could have chosen instead. We choose to make effigies of Guy and throw him on huge fires every November 5th, and let off rockets. This all happened in 1605 so we have long memories. We do all of this because we want to remind ourselves of the futility of trying to overthrow the British Crown. It’s not without a good dose of humour, as might be imagined.
What it does show also is the importance of the gesture, the grand event, and that some things are remembered more than others, perhaps even for centuries, and not always for logical reasons. Guy would be pretty pleased if he knew.
What I also learned this week, from my Bob Odenkirk audiobook, is that entertainment and especially comedy offer us a route to safety in dark times. Anyone who can mock themselves or take the piss out of themselves is probably going to be okay in the long run. I learned or reminded myself that entertaining people is in itself a noble artform, and important in its own right.
“We’re not curing cancer here. We are a distraction which is inarguably key to life on Earth, because life on Earth is so bleak and painful, and the only and best response to that is to look away. We’re giving people something to look at while they’re looking away. It’s a good job.”
Bob Odenkirk on comedy and entertainment
I’ve just finished editing the fourth episode of the Cyrena at Home series of chats and we end on the importance of humour. I say something like this: “I think the world is so crazy and bizarre that the only way to describe it is through humour. There’s a skill to that. And I think that the world is so bizarre… you just have to rip the piss out of yourself because there’s no other option. Otherwise, you just go down this wormhole.”
I quite liked that when I heard it back and managed to edit the waffle out. In the third show, Cyrena was talking about Amy Winehouse when she remembered an absolute gem at the end of the documentary called simply Amy, which you can read below. Tony Bennett had recorded a duet with Amy a year or two before she died, and he was upset when he remembered her short but brilliant contribution to music.
We will be back around thanksgiving with that fourth episode, and I am hopeful of an end of year special in which we will try (and most probably fail) to keep it light and boppy all the way.
Goodbye! I am now off to a very isolated coastal town somewhere in 1950s England. Proof, if it were needed, of the lengths I will go to avoid writing that Fleetwood Mac book.
“[Amy] was one of the truest jazz singers I ever heard. To me, she should be treated like Ella Fitzgerald, like Billie Holiday. She had the complete gift. If she had lived, I would have said ‘slow down, you’re too important’... life teaches you how to live it. If you live long enough.”
Tony Bennett on Amy Winehouse
You can follow the “at home” chats here on Substack, on Spotify and over on Apple Podcasts too.
