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“There won’t be any sad programs? There won’t be any need for tragedy?”

Sad programs are not entertaining, he was told. The purpose of entertainment was to enliven life, to create delight, to instill more vigor and energy and intelligence!

“Any more programs where the hero dies at the end?”

The bliss people laughed nervously and the Maharishi seemed perplexed and the inquisitor knew well that if Elvis had not died at the end of Love Me Tender he could not have sung from the clouds before the closing credits, which would have made the movie not so great. He and Michael once watched Lassie Come Home on television in Great Neck and, throughout the film, they took turns leaving the room to cry, then took turns teasing each other about it, which was a happy brotherly memory for both of them.

“I like to watch programs that make you want to cry at the end. Will there still be programs like that?”

Mass nervous bliss laughter again. (Such persistence, this inquisitor!) Maharishi told him that as society became more positive, there would be more comedies and fewer tragedies. Then the inquisitor mentioned the sort of comedian who does darker things, unpleasant things, yet funny things, and the Maharishi said that such a comedian has a low level of consciousness and could clearly benefit from a little elevation.

“I wonder if a crazy man—”

They laughed—never had an inquisitor inquisited quite like this—while Maharishi interrupted to say that crazy men tend to be unreasonable and not the best examples of positivity.

“No no, a crazy man, a crazy man, somebody, for instance … he isn’t exactly crazy … like some of the old comedians who were looked on as odd. But they were naturally that way and that was their career…. What I’d like to know is if a comedian who is, let’s say, naturally kind of an oddball, looked upon as an oddball, and he’s a comedian because of that, because people laugh at his oddness, but he likes it and everything—”

Maharishi responded that people don’t like oddness, that it was not the oddness that creates delight for people, but rather something in between two extreme oddnesses—a field of silence—that creates a thrill….

[—this was what he had come for, this part, this would tell him everything that mattered and he would learn to do everything just as it was being explained—maybe he had been doing it this way all along; it seemed like he had—but now it became a little clearer to him, so he listened hard as the holy one parsed the ephemeral wisdom—]

Oddness, according to his holiness, was simply a tool with which to create contrasts for an audience. He offered an analogy for the inquisitor—the comedian’s craft, he said, was akin to building two walls side by side and leaving a space in between. The mere presence of those two walls then creates a contrast based on an awareness of the space. And by building such contrasting walls of oddnesses, the comedian is implicitly calling attention to the length and the depth of the silent space that connects the two. And within that space, said Maharishi, lies the harmony that thrills the soul and appeals to the heart!

[—um—]

The comedian, said Maharishi with beatific patience, must first say one thing and then say another thing and these two things will usually contrast—but what makes the contrast so evident is the journey in between, which is the journey through a field of silence. And it is the experience of this journey—from, perhaps, the gross to the subtle—that creates delight. The silence, then, is the very impulse of life!

[—actually, he was confused about the walls and needed that part repeated and crystallized—which was that if a comedian does one unexpected thing and waits before he does another unexpected thing then he will receive a better sort of laughter, which was not unlike what Uncle Sammy had always said about things called Set-Ups and Punchlines, but Uncle Sammy had never dwelled on the part about Silences and certainly Silences were something that he (Andy)