Let’s end the scourge of humorous dyscognition once and for all!

Progressive Charlestown seeks suggestions on how to raise money for research on a cure

By Will Collette

Have you ever seen Ruth Platner or Dan Slattery smile? If they did, would it be something that normal human beings would recognize as a smile? Ron Areglado is almost always smiling, but is he smiling because he’s thinking about something funny or is he just trying to sell you something?

Recent complaints by CCA Party pundit Mike Chambers got me thinking more about how sad Charlestown has become during the past five years under CCA Party control. Even before that, when the CCA Party stalwarts devoted themselves to fighting with former Council President Jim Mageau, the thing that seemed consistent throughout was a complete lack of humor, not to mention a total lack of joy.

I’ve spent my entire adult working life as a professional troublemaker – as an organizer, dirt-digger and campaigner. I really loved my work and did it with joy. I love doing it as a retiree. One of my mentors, the late Tim Sampson, taught me that if the work you’re doing isn't fun, you’re doing it wrong. And the organizing master Saul Alinsky who trained the people who trained Tim was a master trickster who always tried to include humor in tactics of every campaign.

But not the Gray People of the CCA Party. Where is the joy in what they do? Where is the humor?

Sure, when Town Council Boss Tom Gentz is wearing his Uncle Fluffy persona, he cracks joke after corny joke and yuks it up. However, his sense of humor seems forced to me. Like it was a skill he had to learn when he was a high-paid health insurance industry executive who needed to lighten up meetings where the topics were death and dying and screwing insurance customers.

I wonder if there was any discussion at any of Gentz’s health insurance meetings about whether coverage should be extended to Humorous Dyscognition, the horrible affliction that makes the sufferers incapable of recognizing humor when it hits them in the face with a banana crème pie?

It really is a shame to have no sense of humor. To not be able to laugh at Groucho Marx or Woody Allen or Gracie Allen. To fail to appreciate Peeps®. To not get “Harold and Maude.” Or Stephen Colbert.

Humorous Dyscognition strikes the old and young alike. Millions of Americans suffer from it. But there is no National Institute on Humorous Dyscognition at the NIH. There is no American Humorous Dyscognition Association. There are no research programs. Not even a lousy telethon.

And since, at least in my experience, the disease seems to strike affluent white people most frequently, you’d think there would be a really big national push to find a cure.

Uh-uh. Nada.

Well, that stops now. I pledge to do all I can to raise consciousness to the plight of Humorous Dyscognition. 

We haven't come up with a color yet for the planned ribbons and rubber bracelets yet. So I decided to start by responding to a very sad letter CCA pundit Mike Chambers to the Westerly Sun where he condemned Progressive Charlestown’s publication of works of satire.

In an earlier piece, Chambers attacked Progressive Charlestown’s use of caricatures as an act of Nazism because he remembered reading somewhere that a group of skinhead neo-Nazis used caricatures, so naturally that’s the same thing as what we do on Progressive Charlestown.

Clearly, these were Mike’s cries for help. I felt I could no long silently watch Mike’s suffering so I wrote this letter to the Sun: 

To the editor of the Westerly Sun:

I want to thank Mike Chambers for his November 13, 2013, letter to the editor in which he pointed out my failure to more clearly identify a Progressive Charlestown article as satire. The article was about a party he and his neighbors held to celebrate getting Charlestown to spend more than $2 million to protect them from the horrors of wind turbines.

I thought that prefacing the spoof “invitation” with a subheading indicating that it had been found in the paper recycling bin at the Town Dump would be a dead giveaway to the satirical nature of the piece. After all, the people named in the story are surely far too genteel to haul their trash to the dump like the common folk do.

Alas, I had no idea how devastating the terrible yet misunderstood affliction of Humorous Dyscognition could be. I hope Mr. Chambers’ letter will help raise public awareness of Humorous Dyscognition, for which there is currently no known cure. 

Even though it afflicts many people, including nearly every member of the Charlestown Citizens Alliance, very little research is being done to find a way to eradicate this disease.

At Progressive Charlestown, we have been attempting to alleviate the suffering of victims of Humorous Dyscognition by gradually habituating them to increasing doses of humor. But some patients, and Mike is a case in point, react badly to the therapy.

He is right to point out my error in labeling since, as his case shows, some people are allergic to humor.

Will Collette, Co-founder of Progressive Charlestown