Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [160]
But there’s something else, too, that we miss out on if we decline to honor our fallibility. I have written, in this chapter, about the importance of acknowledging our mistakes primarily as a way to prevent them. Sometimes, though, accepting wrongness is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. By way of conclusion, then, I want to turn to a very different reason to embrace error: not for the purpose of eliminating it, but for the pleasure of experiencing it.
15.
The Optimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything
“The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.”
—OSCAR WILDE, A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
Herewith, a very short story at my own expense: one day in the summer of 2007, I traveled by car from Connecticut to Boston with my sister and her family. The car in question was theirs, and new, but, because I am not much of a car person, I didn’t pay it any attention, beyond observing that it was a pleasant shade of blue. In accordance with the principle of Once A Younger Sister, Always A Younger Sister, I was consigned to the backseat with my niece.
A little ways into Massachusetts, we pulled over at a service plaza to grab some food. As we prepared to leave again, the skies, which had been overcast since we left Connecticut, opened up into one of those cats-and-dogs deluges characteristic of summertime in the Northeast. Lacking an umbrella, I returned to the car at a flat run, threw open the door, and flung my sopping self into the backseat—to the visible astonishment and considerable alarm of the total stranger who was sitting there nursing her infant.
It was, you will have surmised, the wrong car. I extricated myself, extremely rapidly and extremely inelegantly; in my final glimpse of the woman, she hadn’t yet altered the stunned look on her face, or slackened her protective grip on her baby. When I found my way to the right car, my sister, who had been following my mad dash at a distance (whether it was too much of a distance to warn me of my impending mistake or whether she was simply curious to see what would happen is a point of some contention), was still convulsed with hysterical laughter.
No question about it: being wrong can be funny. And a cruel but indisputable corollary: other people being wrong can be very, very funny. If, at the end of the last chapter, you wondered what I meant by embracing error strictly for the pleasure of experiencing it, this kind of humor is part of it. As we’ll see in a moment, wrongness and comedy are entwined at the roots. And not just wrongness and comedy: also wrongness and art, wrongness and learning, wrongness and individuality—even wrongness and survival.
But wrongness and comedy is a good place to start, not least because, whether you know it or not, you are already familiar with this relationship. If you grew up watching sitcoms or comedy routines or Hollywood classics or Candid Camera; if you’ve ever laughed at a joke that starts, “A penguin, a lion, and an ape walked into a bar…”*; if you have committed or cracked up at linguistic errors (like a friend of mine who famously asked someone with allergies whether he broke out in chives)—if you have done any of this, then you’ve already experienced error as funny. Such comical mistakes are not rare. Nor are they exceptions to a rule whereby wrongness is normally grim. On the contrary: there is something potentially comedic in the very nature of error. And, conversely, there is something errorlike in the very nature of comedy.
For at least two and a half thousand years, writers, philosophers, and critics have been trying to understand the nature of this relationship between humor and error. One longstanding if rather uncharitable claim is that we laugh at situations in which we are able to look down on other people. This is known as the superiority theory