The Art of Silliness

Donald Trump gave us The Art of the Deal. Sun Tzu, The Art of War. And for any aging hippies out there with intact memories, Robert Pirsig wrote the counter-culture classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Silly me, I thought I invented The Art of Silliness, but apparently art instructor Carla Sonheim has art workshops by this name, dedicated to silliness in art. These include a silliness workbook with ideas like drawing upside down and imagining new worlds with new animal species. Sounds like fun.

But not everyone likes fun. An effective way to commit sillicide (ooh! new word coined! ©) is through the various manifestations of political correctness, where nothing can be funny or fun at all. Things can be (and, apparently, usually are) racist and transphobic, but not fun. Your loss, leftist losers.

Another way to kill silliness is to define it. Merriam Webster does a good job of sillicide with "exhibiting or indicative of a lack of common sense or sound judgment; weak in intellect; trifling or frivolous." Well, that's no fun at all. We'll give Merriam-Webster credit for "playfully lighthearted and amusing." Still a bit stogy, though.

Another on-line dictionary does better: "Silliness often involves a disregard for conventional norms or rationality, and it can be characterized by a sense of spontaneity, absurdity, or whimsicality. It is typically associated with a childlike or carefree demeanor and is often exhibited in humorous or playful situations."

But we can't really blame dictionaries, whose job, after all, is definition. They present us with two different sets of meanings for "silly".

Historically, "silly" as trivial or weak in intellect is a relatively late development. We don't see "silly" meaning "feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish" until around 1570.

Innocent silliness does not make us stupid or feeble in mind. It makes us happy. And the earliest etymology of the word "silly" confirms this.

"Silly" finds its earliest roots in Middle English seli, seely, and before that in Old English sæl, meaning "happiness." Similar roots are found in the Proto-Germanic *sæligas" which is the source also of Old Norse sæll "happy." Even those rascally Vikings apparently got to be silly and happy.

Perhaps the later meaning of "weak in intellect" grew out of misunderstanding of the true nature of this human capacity, its childlike element being confused with stupidity. Is silliness the opposite of cleverness?

British-Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, no slouch in the area of cleverness, famously said, "Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness." This is good advice for many of us who think too much and too heavily. It does not, however, suggest a dichotomy between cleverness and silliness. Both the clever heights and the silly green valleys are part of the overall ecology.

Silliness, we know instinctively, is a kind of letting go, a freeing from boundaries. It is not lack of intellect. Other than freeform, childlike dancing with joy (also highly recommended), silliness is very much connected to intellectual activity. The Monty Python gang, one of the silliest comedy troupes in the history of the universe, were graduates of Cambridge and Oxford. The funniest, cleverest comedy is very often very silly. In fact, silliness may express a kind of perfect union of human faculties, a marriage of intellect and fun. Cruel comedy is not silly. Insults may evoke a kind of guilty laughter, but they are not silly, and not really fun. True silliness employs intellect to capture, evoke and express the spirit of joyful, childlike dancing.

Is it okay to be silly in times of war? Yes! Now, when we go from exhilaration at our successes to despair at our tragedies and losses, and back again, we need silliness more than ever. Silliness can free us and also ground us, reminding us to celebrate life in difficult times. Perhaps the ability to find our silliness in difficult times is how we can understand the art of silliness.

I read a lot of novels, and the parts of even very serious novels that I remember a month or a year later are, interestingly, the occasional silly parts. I recently read a long novel about a Russian man convicted in the 1920's by the Soviet secret police to spend the rest of his life in a hotel. If he ever stepped outside, he would be shot on sight. One of the ways he passed the endless years, with a young girl who became his friend, was to make up short stories with twenty-six words – the alphabet from A to Z. This is quite silly, and also an intellectual challenge. I have been waiting for a chance to try it. So here goes. (X is hard.)

A brave country. Don't ever feel gloomy! Hear, Israel! Justice, kindness, love, make new our peoplehood. Quiet rest soon. Trust ultimate victory. Weirdos – Xanadu. Yours – Zion!

May each of you be inscribed in the book of life, for health, safety, love and family. And a bit of silliness. And may this be the beginning of a new flowering for Am Israel, a new era of peace, security and unity.