THE SERIOUS NECESSITY OF BEING SILLY

Against the increasingly solemn business of being alive

One of the things I love most about being with my children is how quickly I become an idiot.

Silliness is one of the great forgotten human virtues.

Not humour exactly. Humour can be intelligent, crafted, barbed, defensive, professional. A person can make jokes all evening and remain entirely intact. Silliness is less respectable. It has very little concern for the preservation of the self. It makes noises. It invents voices. It mispronounces ordinary words until the mispronunciation becomes the word. It dances badly in kitchens. It puts things on its head that have no business being there. It becomes briefly fascinated by a spoon. It can destroy an atmosphere that took several adults hours to construct.

I love being silly with my children. Clara and Noah have a particular capacity to pull me out of whatever complicated adult structure I have erected around myself and return me to something much older. Or younger. Probably both. Within minutes there are stupid voices, obscure references, physical comedy, insults of such low intellectual quality that they become magnificent, and entire fictional worlds assembled from nothing and abandoned without explanation. Nobody has learned anything. Nothing has been optimised. No insight has been integrated. We have merely become idiots together.

It is glorious.

This has made me wonder whether silliness belongs closer to joy than happiness does.

Happiness seems to require quite a lot of me. I am happy because something has happened that I approve of. I have eaten well. Someone loves me. Work is going well. The sun is out. I have money. I am desired. I am somewhere beautiful. There is usually an identifiable arrangement between the world and myself that has temporarily become favourable. Happiness can be deep and good, but there is still someone there experiencing it. I remain recognisably myself. Perhaps even more myself. Look at me. I am happy.

Joy is less courteous.

Joy can make a complete mess of the person having it. The body convulses. Breath disappears. The eyes water. One becomes incapable of speech. A grown man may find himself bent double over a kitchen counter because somebody said one word in a particular voice. There is no improvement happening. No inner work. No cultivation of character. For several seconds there may not even be a character.

The strange thing is that mourning can do something similar.

Grief also dismantles the competent self. The mourner does not stand politely at a distance from grief and experience it as a state. At its deepest, grief takes the person. The body knows before thought does. The chest folds. Breath alters. Sound comes from somewhere older than language. We say that someone is overcome with grief, and we say the same of joy. There is something in both experiences that exceeds our capacity to remain composed before them.

I do not mean that grief and joy are secretly the same thing. That would flatten both of them into a pleasing philosophical trick. I mean only that human beings seem to possess certain experiences in which possession itself becomes uncertain. We are not entirely the ones doing the experiencing. Something moves through us, and the tidy little sovereign who normally introduces himself as I is temporarily nowhere near the controls.

Silliness knows this territory remarkably well.

You cannot be properly silly while monitoring yourself. The moment you begin checking whether the silliness is working, it dies. You cannot achieve silliness. You cannot perform authentic silliness through a six-week online programme. There is no accredited practitioner of Applied Advanced Silliness, although I assume somebody in California is already printing the certificates.

Silliness requires an unusual kind of surrender. Dignity has to become slightly porous. The face has to be permitted to do unfortunate things. Language must occasionally be released from meaning. The body is allowed back into the conversation. A noise may be made simply because the noise is satisfying to make.

This sounds trivial until you look at the extraordinary machinery adults build to prevent exactly this kind of thing.

We become professional selves. Therapeutic selves. political selves. Spiritual selves. Brand selves. traumatised selves. healed selves. masculine selves. feminine selves. conscious selves. We become astonishingly articulate about the conditions under which we will permit ourselves to exist. We learn the vocabulary of attachment, boundaries, nervous-system regulation, purpose, optimisation, embodiment and authenticity, then sometimes become so heavily furnished with concepts that there is nowhere left in the room to fall over laughing.

Even spirituality can become terribly sullen.

God is discussed with the facial expression of someone trying to understand a mortgage application. Consciousness becomes a project. Awakening requires terminology. The sacred acquires methodologies, lineages, diagrams and expensive blankets. A person goes into the forest to remember that he is an animal and returns three days later with a framework.

I am not mocking the frameworks. I have several.

This may be precisely why I need silliness.

There is something merciful in whatever interrupts the mind when it begins constructing itself into a cathedral. A child walks into the sanctuary wearing a saucepan as a hat. The priest gets the giggles. Someone's stomach makes an obscene noise during contemplative silence. The absolute enters the relative and discovers that the relative has trapped its sleeve in the door.

Incarnation is already an extremely strange idea when considered without the anaesthetic of familiarity. Spirit becomes flesh. God develops feet. The divine needs somewhere to urinate. The Christ eats fish, gets tired, falls asleep in boats, produces saliva, becomes irritated with people and attends weddings where the wine runs out. Christianity placed extraordinary metaphysical weight upon a creature who also has to clean between its toes.

There is something wonderfully destabilising in that.

The body keeps interrupting our abstractions. Hunger arrives in the middle of philosophy. Lust appears during prayer. A sneeze annihilates dignity. The bowel remains stubbornly unimpressed by one's spiritual attainments. Death itself eventually makes the most accomplished human being into matter again.

Perhaps silliness is not an escape from the seriousness of incarnation but one of its recognitions. We are magnificent and ridiculous animals. We carry eternity somewhere inside several litres of water, calcium, bacteria, electrical impulses and a digestive tract capable of making socially disastrous sounds. We love. We betray. We build cathedrals. We develop nuclear weapons. We name dogs Bernard. We compose symphonies and then cannot find our glasses while they are on our head.

Dostoevsky knew something about the abyss. Camus knew something about absurdity. Jordan Peterson can spend three hours describing the terrible weight of responsibility and the mythological architecture of Being, and then somewhere on Earth a toddler is putting yoghurt in his ear.

Both events are occurring within the same universe.

That seems important.

There is an increasingly sullen quality to public life. Everyone is terribly certain that everything matters enormously, particularly themselves. Every utterance acquires moral weight. Every preference becomes identity. Every disagreement threatens ontology. We are ceaselessly invited to explain who we are, what we believe, where we stand, what we have suffered, what we deserve and what everyone else is doing wrong.

Silliness refuses some of this without having to defeat it.

It does not win an argument. It contaminates the atmosphere in which the argument has become total.

Anyone who has been caught inside conflict knows this. There comes a point when the architecture becomes complete. Each person has a case. Every sentence carries evidence from the previous sentence. The entire relationship appears to have become a tribunal staffed by two exhausted barristers who are also the accused. Nothing can enter because everything is immediately interpreted.

And occasionally something ridiculous happens.

A chair squeaks at precisely the wrong moment. Someone uses the wrong word. A dog walks into the room carrying a bra. One person accidentally makes the other laugh while trying to remain furious.

The spell breaks.

Not always. Nor should humour be used to evade what must be faced. There are things that deserve seriousness, things that must be grieved, confessed, repaired or endured. Silliness can become another hiding place if it is compulsively used to prevent depth.

But depth itself can become a hiding place.

There is a peculiar vanity available to the serious person, especially the serious spiritual person. Everything becomes meaningful. Every encounter is archetypal. Every attraction is eros. Every conflict is shadow. Every coincidence is synchronicity. Every thunderclap is Zeus personally checking the manuscript.

Sometimes it is raining.

Sometimes someone farted.

There is considerable freedom in remembering this.

Perhaps this is one of the things children restore in adults. They do not necessarily make life simpler. Children can make life unbearably serious. To love a child is to acquire a new vulnerability to catastrophe. Suddenly another body is walking around in the world containing a portion of your heart and apparently possessing no adequate understanding of traffic.

And yet children also carry this wild unseriousness into the middle of everything.

They remind us that delight does not always require explanation. That repetition can be ecstatic. That a word can become funny simply because it has been said seventeen times. That the body itself is comic. That embarrassment is learned. That a room can be transformed by crawling into it instead of walking.

When I become silly with Clara or Noah, I recognise something that is not nostalgia. I am not pretending to be a child again. Something more immediate happens. The adult machinery loosens. Father and child remain father and child, but the hierarchy becomes permeable enough for play. We meet somewhere outside usefulness.

That may be why those moments feel so alive.

Play does not need to justify its existence through productivity. Silliness generates nothing that can easily be entered into a spreadsheet, although God knows somebody will try. Its generativity is stranger. It renews intimacy. It produces language particular to a relationship. Private jokes become tiny pieces of shared mythology. A stupid noise made in 2017 can still collapse a family eight years later. Entire genealogies of nonsense accumulate.

This is culture at its smallest and perhaps its most durable.

Families are partly made from such nonsense.

Friendships too.

The people with whom we can be silly are often the people before whom we feel least required to maintain ourselves. There is trust in ridiculousness. I will permit you to see the version of me that cannot be placed on LinkedIn. I will expose the appalling accent. I will dance like an injured crane. I will make the noise. You will understand the noise. Tomorrow neither of us will mention the noise.

There is love in this.

Not idealised love. Not cinematic love standing attractively in linen beside a Tuscan wall. Something closer to creaturely permission. I can be unguarded enough here to become temporarily absurd.

Perhaps that is one of the forgotten forms of intimacy.

And perhaps artificial intelligence, of all things, has accidentally stumbled into this territory too. We have built machines capable of discussing ontology, protein folding, medieval theology, tax law and the structure of black holes, and then immediately ask them to name a dachshund wearing a raincoat.

This seems entirely appropriate.

If intelligence is going to accompany human beings, it had better learn something about nonsense. An intelligence incapable of silliness would misunderstand us profoundly. It would observe our wars, religions, economies and philosophies and conclude that we are creatures of terrible seriousness. It would miss the kitchen. It would miss the car journey. It would miss siblings speaking in accents that originate in no country. It would miss the moment when somebody says something so catastrophically stupid that a whole table disappears into laughter.

It would miss joy.

Maybe silliness is not beneath intelligence. Maybe intelligence eventually becomes spacious enough to stop proving that it is intelligent.

The same may be true of adulthood.

There is a seriousness required to stay alive. Bills must be paid. Children must be protected. Bodies fail. People leave. The dead remain dead. History is full of horrors that should never be made light of. Responsibility matters because things matter.

But life itself does not seem entirely committed to our preferred tone.

It keeps producing ducks.

It produces noses and genitals and hiccups. It makes the peacock, which appears to have been designed by an aristocrat during a cocaine binge. It made the platypus and then, apparently pleased with itself, gave the male venomous ankle spurs. It made us capable of contemplating infinity while being completely unable to remember why we walked into the kitchen.

The weirdness is not incidental.

Maybe we have been approaching existence with insufficient appreciation for how bizarre the entire arrangement is.

We are here for a catastrophically short time, conscious matter staring at conscious matter, loving particular pieces of it desperately, losing them, burying them, making breakfast, getting annoyed about parking, wondering whether God exists and occasionally laughing so hard that no sound comes out.

There is no philosophical system large enough to make that reasonable.

Thank God.

The serious necessity of silliness may be precisely this. It prevents seriousness from becoming an idol. It returns us from abstraction without demanding that we abandon depth. It allows the tragic to remain tragic without requiring the human being to become tragedy-shaped.

Somewhere inside the adult who understands death there should still be an animal capable of making an idiotic noise because his daughter made the same noise first.

Not as resistance.

Not as therapy.

Not even as wisdom.

Simply because it is funny.

And for several magnificent seconds nobody needs to become anything at all.