Comedy and Japan

Time for the monthly blog post. I like blogging, I’m finding, but if I force myself to make more posts, I find I don’t enjoy it as much. Isn’t that the point? I’ve seen a lot of “final posts” from bloggers who ran out of things to say and they had been updating quite regularly. Hey, slow down, Fast Eddie. Blogging should be like any other writing: You do it because you love it. If you’re not loving it, change it so that you are. If that means less updates, then so be it. OK, rationalization over.

Now, unless you live in a cave without wifi, you are aware of what’s going on in Japan. The easiest, quickest way to help is just to go to redcross.org.

Now when you think of comedy, it’s difficult to think of it as anything more than entertainment, and how it can lighten your mood. But can it really help people?

Graham Elwood and I have been doing the comedyfilmnerds.com podcast for over a year now and we’ve been really loving it. It’s been fun, liberating and just very satisfying. We have many listeners, from all over the world. That’s what’s so amazing about the internet. You can now really reach people all over the world with your work. As long as they understand your language of course.

We have listeners in Japan, and we started hearing from them. And what we heard was heartbreaking. Thankfully, the fans we heard from were safe and so were their families. One guy e-mailed and said it took him 8 hours to walk home from work since the trains weren’t running. He was worried about his family and listened to us on the walk, and it made him feel better and gave him a few laughs as he walked home with no way to contact his family. When he finally got home, everyone was OK.

We received another e-mail from another fan about how Comedy Film Nerds fans and other writers for our site kept her company via Twitter during the hardest time. So thanks to Facebook and Twitter, we could communicate and ultimately make a connection with each other. Isn’t that the whole point of social media? Or is it to play Farmville?

To have what we do in some small way help people, especially during a tragedy, is about as big of a compliment there is. Ultimately, as artists, no matter what we’re doing be it writing a novel, painting a pastoral landscape or telling a joke, the end goal is to make someone’s life a little better, by giving them an escape, (or in rare cases, having your work stay with them) even if just for a fleeting moment. Artists have certainly done it for me, and to hear we’ve done it for other people is again, the ultimate compliment.

So Graham and I were humbled and flattered by the e-mails. But obviously, there is so much more we can do. So please help. Jokes are great, but people need food, clothing, and shelter as well. Redcross.org