From the silly to the sublime

From Your Man Devine:



We all know what it means to be serious and unserious. There are times and places for both. More importantly, the two should probably not cross over, at least for very long. Sports, even office sports that involve a Nerf hoop and a chair with a cardboard cutout of a guy's head, have an inherent element of, well, 'silliness' my be too trite, but certainly the same element of suspension of disbelief that allows us to enjoy stories about dragons and wizards and interplanetary travel and whatnot. It is a place where you can let your imagination travel to unfettered that allows for a more full expression of all the outrageous stories that you have inside of you that sometimes need to escape.

To quote Lester Bangs from the movie "Almost Famous:"

These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it. They are trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously and righteously dumb! And you're smart enough to know that.  And the day it ceases to be dumb is the day it ceases to be real.  Right?  And then it will just become an Industry of Cool.

Chesterton writes:

"SERIOUSNESS is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good TIMES leading article than a good joke in PUNCH. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

So go on. Practice those Nerf dunks. Play your air guitar. Go on, you good thing.