The Comedy of Perspective

Meeting your third Iago and other surprises.

May 16, 2024

The Third Iago

Mel Brooks defines tragedy as, “When I have a hangnail.” Comedy, he says, is, “When you fall off a cliff and die.” The joke is about our failure to measure the relative size of things. What’s personal, no matter how petty, is big to us. What’s happening to someone else, no matter how catastrophic, is relatively small—in our honest capacity to feel. Comedy is tragedy plus time. This insight, itself, is tragedy plus time. Comedy is where you wind up if you live long enough. Comedy is where you arrive after meeting your third Iago.

After all, the first time you meet a Iago—the famous villain in Shakespeare’s Othello—you would naturally feel homicidal. Here is a person who pretends to be your most trusted friend and for no definite reason devotes himself to destroying your life. If by some fluke you don’t murder your wife or wind up dead, yourself, it’s only a matter of time before a second Iago will cross your path. At this point, you would reasonably ask yourself: Am I a Iago-magnet? Do I unconsciously attract these people? You would enter therapy, but it wouldn’t help because the cause is not in you.

When, further down the line, you meet your third Iago, you come to understand that the tragic circumstances of a Iago encounter are not personal. Every so often, you are just going to meet a despicable agent bent on your ruin.

But that’s not enough. You have to see, as well, you too harbor a Iago inside—a creature who privately rejoices at the failures of friends and feels faint when hearing about their successes. And if instead of beating your chest with horror you shrug with acceptance that you aren’t always a nice person, then you are breathing the comedy of perspective.

Wired

Emotions more or less begin in the amygdala, two almond-shaped structures in our brains. The reptilian brain, some call it, responsible for identifying threat and sending out an alarm to fight or run. As you become angry, your muscles tense, and neurotransmitters called catecholamines produce a burst of energy urging you to action. Your heart accelerates, your blood pressure rises, and your breathing speeds. You flush as extra blood enters your body parts, and your attention narrows to the focus of your rage. You can’t think of anything else. Adrenaline and noradrenaline kick in, and now you’re roused for running around like a lunatic. The amygdala is so good at sensing threat, we’re off like a jet before the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for thought and reason, has a chance to check on the reasonableness of our reaction. We’re wired to act before we can properly consider the consequences of our actions. Good luck at managing this.

A Flemish giant rabbit in England . . . true story, when Richard was a little boy, there was a man in his village who raised Flemish giants, and his name was Mr. Bunny.

Garden

Our gardens hardly need me, they’re doing so well, yet I’m still greedy for more plants. If you plant mature plants donated by kind people who are thinning their beds and if you smother them with compost, they will go nuts and reproduce like rabbits. Rabbits and deer are the things the gardens need me to protect them from. A rabbit I recognize from last year has already eaten a bed of Iris leaves before I could spray them with anti-rabbit juice. I’m greedy in a way I enjoy, except when people can see it. If you want to be as greedy as me, you have to be like one of the contemptible rabbits that eat everything when no one is looking.

I enjoy most of the seven deadly sins either as sins or as their converted forms, pathologies. I don’t know all the seven deadly sins. Most aren’t actually deadly. I murder insects. What is greed as a pathology? An eating disorder? Compensation for parents who left you outside to eat the shoots of iris plants?

I also like gluttony. It’s a form of greed, I guess. I remember standing in front of the refrigerator every time a rejection letter arrived or someone I wanted to be with canceled a date. I would feel the cold air surround me and look inside the fridge, as if it contained the mountain of happiness where the Pied Piper led the children of Hamlin.

Gluttony is only halted by vanity. It has always seemed so unfair to me that gluttony and vanity can’t co-exist. Stealth gluttony is of course necessary, but stealth vanity is stupid. What would be the point?

There is covet your neighbor’s wife. The bible or whatever was written by men with men in mind as readers. Coveting your neighbor’s wife is something every woman can also do, of course, plus coveting your neighbor’s boy toy. I’m a fountain of covet. It’s my oily fuel, the refrigerator air I breathe.

Forgetting

In Stumbling on Happiness (2006), Daniel Gilbert explains that memory is mostly an improvisation based on a small number of recorded cues, rather than the retrieval of stored data. In a similar way, the brain fills in visual ground missing from the eye’s blind spot—where the optic nerve swerves off to join the brain. So, instead of a black hole in our vision, we see a seamless picture patched together by the mind’s hunch that what’s proximate to the blind spot extends through it. We know this fact of our physiology, yet each time we see its proof in a visual field experiment, we gasp with astonishment to see the mind’s trick.

Biz

Dear paid subscribers, you are supporting my writing life! Huge thanks.

To keep the publication going, I need more readers to upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Writing the stack is a full time job. If you’ve been enjoying the writing for a while, maybe this is the time to make a contribution. It doesn’t have to be forever! You can hop in and hop out again, and I will thanks you. I promise.

Paid subscribers are invited to monthly Zoom conversations on writing craft and the content of the posts—are you interested in the way a comic vision develops over time? Paid subscribers are welcome to send ahead questions about their own writing projects as well, and paid subscribers gain access to the full archive of over 160 literary pieces.

You can subscribe for as little as a month, and you can easily unsubscribe at any time. That’s why new people need to step in. With a subscription model, there is always a churn of people entering and leaving. I set the prices very low with the hope that a collective of loving readers, paying small amounts, is the most encouraging form of collaboration.

Right now, new subscribers can upgrade to a paid subscription at a monthly rate that's less than a cup of coffee, and I will keep you caffeinated every day of the month.

Zoom conversations.

The next Zoom conversation on writing craft and on the subject matter of the stack is on SATURDAY May 25 from 3 to 4pm EST. To RSVP, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com

Some emails go astray, so please be sure I have confirmed you on the list. If not, I haven’t received your RSVP, so please send me a message here or on FB messenger.

The Zooms are joyous gatherings FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS, where you can interact with other writers and readers, and where, ahead of time, you are invited to send questions about your own writing projects. Very tender and smart people show up. I can't believe the number of smarty-pants people who come.

Working together one-on-one.

To work with me on a one-to-one basis, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. The first conversation is free to establish whether we are a good fit and I can assist your work.