Do you know what day it will be on Monday? It’s Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. Thus the third Monday of January was designated as the worst of the 365 days of the year – without any scientific basis, but it has become commonplace. As for me, on the first Monday, I was already on the ground, due to the lack of sun and the holiday season. No matter how hard I swallowed omega-3 and vitamin D capsules, nothing could cheer me up.
Until I look LOL: Who will have the last laugh?, on Amazon’s Prime Video platform, the Quebec adaptation of a Japanese concept which consists in locking up ten comedians for six hours where they do nothing but nonsense to make others laugh who must resist this desire, even by a simple smile. The last one to laugh won’t get a fag (as in the goatee game), but will win a $100,000 prize to be donated to the cause of their choice.
My colleague Hugo Dumas spoke well of it.
When I read the synopsis, I wasn’t sure I was going to waste my time with this show, but on the verge of despair, I watched all six episodes.
And I was cured!
Laughing is like a dog’s tail. Is she jerking off because he’s happy or is he happy because she’s jerking off? You never know, but one thing is certain: when I laugh, I get better. It’s unmissable.
We are told to move, eat better and sleep well, and these are obviously good recommendations that can’t hurt, but laughing has an immediate effect on me.
It doesn’t take me the best comedy show in town to get to that state, because all the absurd details in life are in my opinion the best show, and it plays every day. There is nothing more comforting than to check once in a while if you are not dead inside, and it can happen by surprise, in an extremely banal way like seeing a passerby fall on your ass and get up quickly hoping no one saw him.
I make a confession here: I have suffered from fits of giggles since childhood, which sometimes put me in extremely uncomfortable situations. Like that time in church, where I burst into a howl that I had been holding back for too long, only because there was a gentleman repeating the phrases from the late Mass for everyone. Or at funerals (it happens to me every time, it must be nervous). As I was a rather well-behaved student, only my uncontrollable giggles which annoyed the teacher earned me detentions.
Biting his cheeks, thinking about sad things like his dead dog… I’ve used this trick very often in my life to keep myself from being ashamed, with varying degrees of success. Stopping laughing is probably one of the worst tortures out there. I really believe you can die from it – it almost happened to me once, when my spleen was stuck for an hour (hence the term “cramped up”).
Biting his cheeks to keep from laughing is what you’ll see a lot in LOL. We have the impression that Edith Cochrane is on the verge of fainting, and that Rachid Badouri is suffering very badly inside.
For three episodes, Christine Morency looks downright like a fish that lacks air and I understand her too much. They are professionals, because I wouldn’t survive three seconds in this game. I did the test in my living room and I just couldn’t do it. Especially when Cherze Siachon (character of Yves P. Pelletier) offers a course in diction. Just trying to say Cherze Siachon is already a trigger for me.
“The most wasted of all days is the one on which we didn’t laugh,” wrote Chamfort, my favorite moralist. As the day of this Monday seems lost in advance because it is “Blue Monday”, I urge you to find something to laugh at, no matter where. It can be with LOL, watching videos of drunk people falling in the wedding cake, with a friend, your dog or just because someone farted on the subway, but I swear it works. In any case, it can’t hurt, until January ends.