Part the Second, of Twelve.

The most-human of all emotions, more than mating, more than shitting, more than eating, more than fukcing, is laughing.

You can fight me on this.

You can ignore me.

You can try to prove to me that that ain't so.

But I'll just laugh you off.

I'd say, every creature on our planet, and probably atom-sized neutrinos too, mate and shit and eat and so on, but only humans laugh.

Over my nearly half a century in advertising, especially in meeting rooms, client presentations and finished work, I've noticed that laughter--which used to be welcomed and expected, which used to be a personal differentiator--is now not only anomalous, it's actually scorned. You can get fired for being funny.

There's a simple parallel. You can also get fired for being different, for being human, for disagreeing, for standing up for things that today are oft-interred. That is principles, taste, decency and thought

The prevailing ethos in advertising and the world today is that we are in a serious business. Clients are paying serious money, and the industry itself is run by serious consultancies, so making a joke is like doing stand-up at an autopsy.

(To be blunt about it, the industry--and most of those in it--have serioused themselves to death.)

What's more, the billionaire-class, who increasingly are the C-suite of the Fortune-50 companies with global brands that agencies serve, have become through the years less-and-less human. They're too busy and too rich to actually laugh. In fact, they have so much money--and are so unlike the people they're ostensibly "messaging" to--that they are hardly anymore to be considered like you and I. They don't lower themselves to one-liners, pratfalls, word-plays or even merry mix-ups.

That's all beneath them.

As someone who's wrestled with the three-headed, or six-headed, or thirty-six-headed growling dog-god of depression, I've probably been sad for sixty-eight of my nearly sixty-nine years. I think my ratio might be a little worse than most others, maybe I have fewer serotonin uptake inhibitors than most, but still, if people were inherently merry, liquor and beer sales in the US would likely not tally almost $80,000,000,000 a year. In 2013, the last year I could find data for, cocaine sales tallied $34,000,000,000, and legal marijuana sales are close to $40,000,000,000. That's almost one-hundred-and-fifty billion dollars spent annually in intoxicants--that's a lot of money staving off dour.

No wonder Woody Allen said, and millions agreed, "being funny is a second choice."

Or as Henry David Thoreau never said (while his mom did his laundry) “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

A lot of unsung songs.

Those are eloquent ways of stating the obvious.

As are these:

'Life," as Hobbes said in the Leviathan, "is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Or as the Buddha might have said, "everyone carries a burden."

Or as, most profoundly, Shecky Weinstock said one night at the Nevele many decades ago, "Life sucks and then you die. Try the veal."

With all that, maybe the kindest, most-loving, most-uplifting. most-human thing one person can do for another might also be the simplest.

Handing someone a laugh.

BTW, re the remember part of "remember to laugh."

My sister was killed in 2007 as she was riding her new Ducati motorcycle up 12th Avenue in Manhattan. It was early on Mother's Day morning and a drunk ran across the wide avenue.

Nancy swerved to avoid him and in a moment the large bike crushed the small girl. 

I have a lot of memories of Nancy. 

But as I was writing this piece I remembered two jokes she liked that somehow capture who she is, maybe better than a complete Robert Caro biography would.

The first she made up when she moved to Chicago with our parents when she was 16 or 17. 

She said someone asked her:

"Have you lived in Chicago your whole life?"

She answered, "I don't know. I'm not dead yet."

The second laugh she made up was at a bus stop in Chicago as she was waiting for the 151 bus on Michigan Avenue. 

Someone asked her:

"Does the bus go to-the-loop."

Nancy answered, "No. It goes beep-beep."