On Play

Jokes to Survive the End Times

The message came through last week, five years ago, on Sniffies, fifteen years ago, on Grindr, on Adam4Adam: So what’s going on? Do you want to play?

I sometimes did and sometimes did not want to play, and I sometimes did and sometimes did not play. Every time, even with the boy built like a cheerleader and a stumbler at that, I recoiled at the metonym. Play felt juvenile, frivolous, and sex was everything but: it was profound, embodied, and, because I am from a generation of queer people killed by HIV/AIDS, sex brought an inevitable proximity to death.

In French, my only other tongue, the verb to play – jouer – and to cum – jouir – are near homonyms, but cuming – it seems to me – is the least playful part of sex. It’s the point of arrival, where desire begins to end and rationality returns. One wonders, sometimes, even seconds after jouissance, why exactly one took an Uber in the middle of the night to a stranger’s apartment. One wonders at many things in one’s life, and how one ended up here, and what was it all for.

I’m not writing to talk about sex, though, not necessarily. I’m writing to explain the jokes. A few folks have texted to ask: What’s going on with your Facebook, why these posts about age, why the curmudgeonly attitude?

So I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. This is not simply due to my newish arrival in middle age, nor to the fact that many friends have lost parents lately. I’ve begun to mourn friends themselves, too, but that started early for me, even in my 20s. Thinking about death is not an HIV-aftermath thing, nor is it strictly related to the deathly politics America et al. seem to be doubling down upon. Unlike Anne Carson, with whom I think I share a general sense of sadness, the black doorway of mortality didn’t hide itself from me until I was 70. I never went about getting the life I wanted as a bus driver, a professor, or a pirate. I never thought the life I wanted was entirely possible. I have always looked forward to death if only for its quiet, it’s endless stasis.

Jouer and jouir do not share a latin root (iocus and gaudēre respectively) and have simply grown closer over time. Freud connected death and orgasm both as annulments of desire, the former temporary, until horniness or feral feelings return, and the latter final, with some flat assumptions about reincarnation. And yes, I suppose, this is why death appeals to me: If we follow Jacques Lacan in that desire is never achieved, and if America et al. seems so insistent on rendering precarity as life-long as possible, then maybe death is the only way out. What a joke!

In a conversation with Michael Silverblatt at the Lannan Foundation, Carson discusses playing with language, and in particular trying to remove language to just at but not past the point where sense leaves it, as a way to combat sadness. Thinking as play. Writing as thinking as play. Play, in writing and thinking, the only way to stave of despair.

You will forgive me, then, for my dumb dad jokes on Facebook. They are jokes, I promise, and not a cry for help.

I used to make a stupid podcast – Food 4 Thot – with my idiot genius friends. Once a week, and sometimes more, we got together to be very stupid and playful, and somehow tens of thousands of people listened. I don’t make that show anymore, and that space of play – with an audience – is one I miss very dearly.

The post above, in particular, I love. I began making posts about my ex not long after our breakup, and they amused me, which almost nothing did then. Yes, it’s been nearly 10 year since we broke up, and everything in my life has changed, except for the fact that these posts still make me laugh. Even if no one else does, I do. And that’s enough.

I came late to play in my writing. The Thots, and Food 4 Thot more generally, forced this play into my artistic life. Stupid little jokes can be life-savers. Life, this capitalist treadmill of money-in and money-out, work and bills, meals and defecation, and because food costs and toilet paper costs, we have to pay for both. Play, and in particular play on the page and in my art, feels like the one thing that makes life actually a net positive other than cooking for, and nourishing, my friends.

There is a character in me, who is me, and who also is not, who is a cantankerous old gay man with lower back pain, who resents aging into being a top who boys only a couple of years younger than him call “daddy,” and who thinks nightlife has gotten “loud” and “expensive” and “crowded.” I’m not sure what writing project he’s working on, really, but he’s having fun doing a Joseph Osmundson Social Media Take Over for now.

I still bristle every time A Gay™ calls sex “play,” and I realize this might be some of my own Irish Catholic Repression: sex can and should feel playful. Further, play can be deeply and deadly serious, it can be a site of not just joy and pleasure but creation.

I do feel that play makes life edge into the zone of the bearable, if only, if just. I hope we all can laugh. I hope you enjoy. Bad jokes: I’m Joseph Osmundson, a scientist, nonfiction writer, and my CPAP is my newest kink device. The day I stop joking is the day I want to die. Dad jokes: My kink is, apparently, my body not choking itself to almost-death 473 times a night. Liberation for libertines can be found, apparently, in the dark room at Animal, but I’ll be watching Rick Stein and falling asleep by 11:45pm. J’espère ne jamais arrêter de jouer, and, on some good days, to also j’espère aussi jouir.