There is very little on film or television that moves me to laughter. I am often amused, tickled, impressed by the cleverness of some comedian but, if I watch a whole program I am out of spirits half way through and distinctly disjointed by the last phase of the sequence. As the piece progresses, my laughter becomes mechanical and each chuckle intensifies my ill-at-easeness. At the end of the program I feel flat and empty. I also feel I have wasted my time. There are some comedians who seem to keep tickling my fancy. Seinfeld is one of them. -Ron Price with thanks to G.B. Shaw on Oscar Wilde in Bernard Shaw: A Critical View, Nicholas Grene, MacMillan Press, London, 1984, p.4.
Laughter is idiosyncratic, canned,
a commercial product. I feel it inside,
welling-up, fast, a spontaneous explosion,
frequently in Seinfeld, a program of skits
about nothing, trivia, the spaces in relationships,
self-centered human beings. I dig the absurd,
my laughs and millions of others
in this most popular of programs,
where the energies of comedy are harnessed,
dynamically: do we understand ourselves
in the end? Society? I create nothing.
I invent nothing. I imagine nothing.
I see the drama and laugh at everyday nothingness.
Can I call these laughs spiritual relaxation?
Filling my pocket full with the most delightful emptiness
and the weight of the day lifts, exploded into thin air.
Ron Price
16 August 1998
