As a voracious reader going back to my school days at Saints (Stanley Greaves had introduced me to the British Council Library to my delight), I remember once being struck by a comment from then US President John Kennedy which went something like this: “Mankind has two things he can draw on to deal with life’s many problems: one is God and the other one is sense of humour. God, however, is beyond our understanding, so ultimately we have to rely on humour to deal with our trauma.” I cannot remember the context of the remark – I have searched avidly time and again, in various corners, and can find no record of it anywhere – but I have often remembered it when I encounter a striking piece of humour and, looking back, I can see that my early interest in humour, going back to my school days, was also behind my early interest in calypso when I first heard that music. The musical gems from singers such as Spoiler and Pretender and Kitch, and later Dougla and Lord Funny and Gabby, were treasures for me for their comedic genius, and were a powerful influence on my own work and, indeed, on my view of life. I came to see that JFK was right in seeing a sense of humour as a saviour for mankind, and as I came here with the Tradewinds in the hard socialism years in Guyana, I saw time and again how Guyanese were turning to humour as a balm for the vexing situations confronting them. I was seeing the travail first hand, and up close, and to my question about how they were dealing with it, I would often hear, “Boy, you have to laugh; that is how you deal with it.” The JFK wisdom, delivered in America, was being reinforced for me in my homeland.
