Decorate Reality

NPR’s Morning Edition opened with a clip from a new comedy special. The voice was Josh Johnson’s. The audience was already laughing.

I don’t know if you can tell by looking at me, but I was fired from being in a gang.

……They kicked me out because I was too positive.

The laugh broke open again, longer this time. The clip ended. A Martínez came back on, introduced Josh Johnson and the special — Symphony, debut on HBO Max — and then said something I wasn’t expecting.

That is comedian Josh Johnson. Now, you may know him as one of the correspondents and hosts of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

His debut HBO Max special is called “Symphony.”

Josh, that clip, no matter how many times I hear it, makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I connected with it because I was a weak, scrawny kid, got pushed around a lot.

My uncle was in a gang, and I asked him if I could join, and he said, no, we really can’t use you.

Two men, decades and coasts apart, recognizing each other through a single punchline. One of them a national radio host saying, out loud on the air, that happened to me.

That was when I found the closest parking spot I could and put the car in park. I sat there with my hands on the wheel, the cortado cooling in the cup holder, and listened to the rest. I took notes by the time the segment was over.

That recognition is what this essay is about.

Two men, decades apart, recognizing each other

When a comedian names what a thousand strangers have privately felt, and one of them admits in public that they have lived that exact thing, something quiet and important happens. The naming penetrates. The shame relents. The listener discovers, in real time, that they are not alone with what they thought was uniquely wrong with them.

Johnson opens Symphony with a hand-lettered title card that extends a Jean-Michel Basquiat aphorism. Art decorates space. Music decorates time. Comedy, the card concludes, is how we decorate reality. The card sits in front of an open busker’s case filled with flowers, the case that was supposed to hold coins, holding something useless and beautiful instead. This concept was alluded to in the interview. I wanted to know more.

What “decorate” actually means

Decorate. Not change, not transform. Decorate. At first, it sounded fun, almost whimsical — the way we use the word when we talk about arranging a room or celebrating a milestone. Then I thought more about d-e-c-o-r-a-t-e.

We decorate a soldier. The medal pinned to a uniform is not ornamentation. It is the public acknowledgment of bravery that was real and costly. The decoration is the honor.

We decorate a home. Four walls are shelter; what we do to those walls is what turns them into a place where we live. It is not only what makes it habitable, but it’s what brings identity and place to the space.

And the same Latin root, decus, gives us decorum — the cousin word that names the grace of meeting a moment with the form it deserves. Classical rhetoricians used decorum to mean fitting style to subject, knowing which register the moment calls for.

So comedy is how we decorate reality is a bolder claim than it first appears. Comedy is how we honor what we are actually living through. How we make reality habitable enough to stand inside it. How we meet the moment with the form it asks for. That is the most accurate description I ever had for what humor does to the felt human experience.

The four things humor measurably does

Humor decorates reality in at least four ways that have been measured. None of them changes the underlying reality. All of them, however, change the felt experience of it, which is where the magic is.

Some of what humor does is physical. A real laugh fires the vagus nerve, contracts the diaphragm, dials down the sympathetic surge. Not a metaphor, a measurement. It’s why people laugh at funerals, after near misses, in hospital waiting rooms. The body is reaching for the only legal sedative in the room. Whatever is happening hasn’t gotten any smaller. The body steadies enough to look at what it couldn’t a minute ago.

Some of it is social. When a comedian names what a thousand strangers have privately felt but never said aloud, every person in the room learns in real time that they aren’t alone with it. Shame depends on isolation. It can’t survive the discovery that the thing you thought was uniquely wrong with you is in fact a feature of being human.

When Johnson’s audience laughs at his observation that nice isn’t the bar, that’s the floor, that being called nice after a date means nothing actually registered, every person in the room who has performed gentle decency only to be received as forgettable is suddenly seen. Comedy can get a thousand people there in one fell swoop.

Some of it is cognitive. Every setup and punchline is a small rotation of perspective. The audience holds an expectation, the comedian pivots it. Repeated exposure to good comedy is repeated practice in holding the same fact two ways.

Johnson does this in the bit about why people are drawn to careless drivers and careless partners. He sets the audience up to expect a moral about the bad-boy archetype, then delivers himself daydreaming in the back of an Uber, admitting he liked the swerve. The line he lands on is precise: careless people are incredibly enchanting until they’re careless with you.

The audience leaves with a looser grip on what they thought they wanted, which is the prerequisite for wanting anything different.

And some of it is access. Comedy is one of the few ways human beings can think about the material their defenses ordinarily lock out. Grief, sex, parenting, family rage, mental illness, the gap between who they appear to be and who they actually are. The frame this is funny disarms the guard. Hard material slips in past the place that ordinarily refuses it. It’s why comedians can talk about depression and addiction and abuse in front of strangers, with less resistance than the same content would meet almost anywhere else.

What humor cannot do: Robin Williams

But the modesty of decorate starts to matter as soon as you sit with what humor doesn’t do.

Robin Williams had access to maybe the most fluent naming apparatus in modern comedy. He could articulate his own interior, bipolar disorder, the dread of losing his mind, and a thousand people would laugh in recognition. He died by suicide in 2014. He had been misdiagnosed in life; autopsy confirmed diffuse Lewy body dementia. He was already losing the brain by the time he died. Perfect public naming, night after night, did not slow the thing.

Williams wasn’t an exception to what humor does. He was a reminder of what it cannot do. The people who decorate reality for the rest of us are often the people holding back the most ocean themselves. The visible humor and the held-back ocean are two halves of the same person. The buoyancy lifts the room they’re standing in. It also keeps them afloat in water no one else can see.

This changes how Symphony sounds on a second listen. Johnson is thirty-six. His opener about how some men spend their last fifty years still figuring out the first fifteen isn’t autobiography; it’s his observation about what he’s been watching from the outside in. The loneliness beats, the faith struggle, the gang clip where his uncle won’t let him join because he’s too positive: these aren’t observations from above his life. They’re his own oceans, made visible just enough to keep him buoyant in front of an audience.

My Irish Uncle Paul

I know what humor at its best can do because of my Irish Uncle Paul. He did the same work Williams did, in much smaller rooms, every day of his life. He didn’t drown.

When email was new, Uncle Paul sent me a joke every Monday morning. Same time every week. Sometimes a forwarded chain joke, sometimes something he’d heard at the pub, occasionally one he’d written out himself. By Tuesday I’d already tried to use it on someone. My delivery is awful.

He used humor at every turn. A genius at pace. At timing. At delivery. A Guinness in his hand at the rugby matches, a cheeky remark to whoever was standing nearest, a joke typed out every Monday morning. A poke at Liz Ann, his wife — he loved to cook for her, and he loved teasing her about how ravenously she ate. No one was immune to his uncanny observation of those around him. He got away with every little wink and nod because each one was, at heart, recognition. The person being teased felt seen, not skewered.

When I visited him in Inchicore, a working-class neighborhood in Dublin, he made the same offerings in person. He poked fun at me, the American who got off the plane at Dublin and walked straight to what should have been the driver’s side at home. He charmed his way through the corner grocery with cheeky remarks to the cashier, the stranger ahead of him, the produce itself. I’d try not to smile, since I was usually the joke, and the smile would arrive on my face anyway, almost involuntarily.

That is what humor does when it’s coming from someone who loves you. It doesn’t argue with how you feel. It puts something in front of you, and your face responds before your defenses do. By the time you notice, you’ve already moved.

I think about Uncle Paul often. A client tells me something painful, braced for me to handle it gently. I say something a little dry. She laughs, not politely but the kind of laugh that comes from her stomach and surprises her on the way out. Her face changes. Whatever she came in clutching is still in her hand, but the grip is looser. She’s suddenly willing to look at it from a different angle. Humor shows up in my work all of the time.

The buoy and the dagger

On a sad Wednesday in May of 2008, Paul sent me a CD through the post. The Celtic Tenors. The album was called Remember Me. The track that mattered was called Ten Thousand Tears.

I was in the middle of a custody battle. My children were doing the deep rejection and retaliation children can do to parents in those years. The title alone — Remember Me — was the demand of motherhood put into my hands by the one person in my life who would never have said it directly. Paul, who usually softened the world for me, was handing me reality unsoftened. The CD didn’t feel like comfort that day. It felt like a dagger. Are you trying to kill me with reality right now, was the thought I had when I opened the envelope. And yet, it was a CD I played on repeat. I sometimes drove around my little town of Concord, to wait until my few favorites were over. A cathartic place to cry and to feel connected.

Uncle Paul was Irish in the way Joyce was Irish — light enough to charm the local butcher, capable of handing you the unsparing thing when the unsparing thing was what the day called for.

Which is exactly why it worked. He had earned the standing to hand it to me. Years of buoying — the Monday emails, the cheeky remarks in the grocery, Inchicore — had built the trust that let him do the opposite when the opposite was what was left. The buoy and the dagger are the same gesture in different registers. Both require the relationship to land safely. A stranger handing me a CD called Remember Me on the worst Wednesday of my year would have been cruel. Paul handing it to me was costly, and it was the truth, and it was the only thing left to send.

The song is sung from the position of someone acknowledging the pain they have caused to a person they love, counting the cost of what they cannot take back. Paul and I had both been on the receiving end of the rejection children can deliver to parents in years like that. He knew what I was carrying because he was carrying his own version of it. He didn’t write a letter. He sent the song.

I didn’t realize, until I started writing this essay, that the song itself was where I’d learned the metaphor I’ve been organizing this whole piece around. The line is in the second verse:

Feel the wave of emotion

Every time I close my eyes I’m holding back an ocean I let it go and start to cry

Ten thousand tears to let me know You are my heart, you are my soul

Ten thousand tears to make me see,

You are the best of me

Paul didn’t only send me a song that knew the size of my grief. He sent me the language I would use, seventeen years later, to describe what we had both been doing. He handed me the words for the work I hadn’t named yet.

Paul knew when humor was the gift, when grief was the gift, and when reality itself was the gift. He had the standing to deliver any of the three. He used humor as a buoy, for himself and for the people he loved, and he had the wisdom to know when to set it down and when to puncture with the unsparing thing instead. That is a harder kind of decorum than the easy version: fitting the form to the moment, even when the form that fits hurts to receive.

We were both holding back oceans. The CDs and the Monday jokes and the cheeky remarks while walking Daisy, the dog, were the surface. The oceans were underneath. Humor was how we stayed visible to each other while the water rose.

What separated Paul from Williams wasn’t the size of the ocean. It was the relationships that received the buoyancy back. Williams gave to millions; we don’t really know how much came home to him. Paul gave to a smaller circle, and it came back to him in kind.

Why humor needs relationship to heal

This is the part comedy by itself can’t do. The stage is a one-way medium. The audience receives the recognition and goes home with it, but no one in the room is there to ask the next question. In a relationship, therapeutic or romantic or friendly or parental, the laugh becomes a hinge. Recognition arrives. Shame relents. Then someone you trust says, and what would happen if you looked at this differently. Curiosity follows. Curiosity is what makes structural change possible.

Humor without relationship is entertainment. Relief. Humor inside relationship opens a door.

Captain Jack Sparrow

Years before he died, Uncle Paul had skin cancer that took much of his face and his eye. He wore a patch. He could have disappeared into the diagnosis. Many people do, and no one would blame him for it. Instead, he turned himself into Captain Jack Sparrow. He worked the patch into every encounter with the same dry charm he’d always used to work a room. People who met him after the cancer remembered the pirate, not the disease. He decorated the reality of his own dying face in real time, with a Guinness in his other hand.

He wasn’t avoiding what was happening. He knew. The humor wasn’t denial. It was a way of staying inside relationship with the people he loved while the body did what bodies do. He decorated, and he stayed long enough to ask the next question.

The Quiet Tension Journal Prompt

This is where it becomes yours.

Where in your life is humor regulating you without your noticing, and what would happen if you noticed?

When was the last time a laugh in a real conversation loosened your grip on something you were holding tightly? What did you do with the loosened grip?

Who in your life is decorating reality for you in a way you haven’t thanked? Who is holding back oceans you’ve never asked about?

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Sharon Chirban, PhD is a clinical psychologist and executive coach with thirty years of experience, including former roles at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. She works with high performers of every kind — founders, executives, athletes, and individuals navigating eating disorders — helping them understand not just how to perform, but what their performance is costing them, protecting them from, and trying to say. She sees clients at Amplify Wellness + Performance.