Just last week Julie, Roberta and I sat in a seaside pub nursing pints of beer, pecking at a mound of French fries and giggling at one another. Every couple of years, the three of us fly across the Big Pond to some small waterfront European town and spend a few weeks indulging in our holy and powerful friendship trinity: idleness, spontaneity and silliness.
With other friends I have fun. With some, I am playful, but the alchemy of this specific trio unleashes the silly in each of us. It is a rare and beautiful thing.
Even though the Merriam-Webster dictionary firstly defines silly as lacking common sense, and secondly as weak in intellect, I choose to see silly in the dictionary’s third definition: playfully lighthearted and amusing. Danish comedian Victor Borge once said that laughter is the shortest distance between people. I say that laughter from silliness is a kind of superglue, erasing all distance between people and bonding them instantly.
Science supports silly. Studies show that silliness (and its first cousins–playfulness and fun) boosts the immune system, sidetracks stress, lowers blood pressure and distracts from chronic pain. Silliness is also a component of the out-of-the-box thinking encouraged for problem solving. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Marx all proposed what at the time might have been considered silly ideas that were later borne out to be brilliant insights.
Even though I have come to prize my silliness, it’s not a word I brandish when I describe myself. Some of that is a holdover from late childhood. Don’t be silly was one of my mother’s go-to admonishments. If I had a suggestion or exhibited some kind of behavior that fell outside of the invisible boundary of okayness, being labeled silly telegraphed it as undesirable.
As a grownup professor person, it is exceedingly apparent that silliness–the least buttoned-up form of playfulness–is nowhere to be found in any definition of adulthood. I’ve never seen it on a job description or a list of leadership qualities. Instead, adulthood prioritizes productivity over playfulness; silliness is remaindered to early childhood. Being an adult means being responsible and organized. It tells us to genuflect before the altar of the serious and bypass the funhouse.
I have been rethinking those dated and starchy ideas. Since I hit my 60s, I’ve been selectively dismantling the armature of adulthood as I look for more ways to cope with a world on fire. How do I choose to embrace these final chapters of my life? My mantra has become some version the Tagalog expression tumatanda nang parong, which means growing backwards. Fun, play, absurd, silly—I see them now as necessary spiritual lubricants that help me navigate into the deeper realms of loving friendships.
When I was in college, I became enraptured with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the British TV comedy show. One sketch burned itself into memory. In it, John Cleese plays Mr. Teabag, a bureaucrat who carries a briefcase and wears a deadpan expression, a suit and a bowler hat. He works at the Ministry of Silly Walks, dispensing government grants to those seeking to create and refine new and silly ways of walking. As the skit opens, Mr. Teabag walks to work, curling his long legs into absurd angles, moving forward on the London city sidewalk one silly step at a time.
I like the direction he’s going.
