Whenever my Reader’s Digest magazine arrives in the mail, I immediately open it to the section called “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” (I subscribe to the ‘large print edition’ because the jokes are so much better in large type.)
Heaven knows, we could use the best medicine right about now. And I mean, a hefty dose of it. (No person has ever died of an overdose of laughter, according to a recent article in The New York Times.)
Which is probably why our US President, Donald Trump — our ‘Comedian-in-Chief’ — has been developing a hit comedy show (“Late Night with The Donald”) during this difficult period in the nation’s history, aided by a team of zany comedy writers including Steve Mnuchin, Mike Pence, William Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Ben Carson — known among Washington DC insiders as “The Riot Squad”.
The President knows what’s good for us. A hearty guffaw. That’s what we desperately need.
Not hydroxychloroquine. Not some poorly vetted, rushed-to-the-market pharmaceutical ‘vaccine’. Just some good old fashioned belly laughs.
On his show last week, The Donald posed in the Oval Office (aka “the Boffo Barn”) pretending to endorse a line of grocery store items manufactured by Goya Foods. The selection totally cracked me up: Red Kidney Beans, Adobo seasoning, White hominy, Coconut milk, and Chocolate wafers. A priceless ‘color-blind’ selection if we’ve ever seen one. Hilarious!
The Comedian-in-Chief even talked his daughter, Ivanka, to get into the act, by having her pose in her living room with a can of Goya brand Black Beans. We rarely see Ivanka join her father in a comedy routine, but in this case, her timing and delivery were spot-on. Her choice of props — “Frijoles Negros” — really tickled my funny bone. LOL! Perfect choice, given all the laughter currently surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement.
The joke was immediately picked up by half a dozen lesser-known American comedians — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Maher — several of whom totally missed The Donald’s humor and assumed (mistakenly!) that the President was actually endorsing Goya products, when everyone knows the Trump family wouldn’t touch a Mexican-sounding food item with a ten foot pole. (Especially not “Frijoles Negros”, for heaven’s sake.)
“Late Night with The Donald” has seen a crazy collection of comedy writers come and go over the past couple of seasons — we can remember some of the side-splitting gags dreamed up by James Comey, John Bolton and Robert Mueller, for example — but the current crop of contributors have really learned how to work with show’s host, and deliver up the medicine we’ve all been dying for.
And speaking of dying… and medicine… and laughter… There’s been significant research lately coming from the Centers for Disease Control finally explaining why laughter is, indeed, the best medicine. Many years ago — back in the days of Bob Hope and Burns & Allen — the CDC published several studies showing that aspirin was actually “the best medicine”. Then they got some different scientists onboard, and we were told — during the heyday of comedians like Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball — that penicillin was the best. Along comes Rodney Dangerfield and Richard Prior, and the CDC changed its tune once again, and claimed that Valium was the best. (Well, it was pretty good, but maybe not the best.). Another batch of comedians arrived — like Jim Carrey and Chris Rock — and the CDC went through a difficult phase where they were confused about which medicine really was the best. (Too much Valium?)
Now that the President has shaken up the CDC and given the boot to some of the straight-laced yahoos who were running that show under previous administrations, we’re finally getting some clinical studies — long-awaited! — that show, definitively, that people who laugh at least twice a day have a reduced tendency to sneeze. It’s long been known that a sneeze allows evil spirits to enter the body, hence the tradition of saying “God bless you”, whenever someone sneezes. (I even say it to myself, if no one is around.) We’ve all heard the expression, “That’s nothing to sneeze at”… which actually means, “That’s nothing to laugh at”… thus clearly demonstrating the medical connection between sneezing and laughing.
Personally, I think the future looks wonderfully bright, now that some of our leading politicians are actually trying to look like clowns. The way things are headed, America is going to die laughing!