Existentialism and The Urge To Both Laugh And Cry At The Same Time

Benedict Andrews’s version of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Young Vic. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Today I’m going to talk about existential crises.

I’ve had many, incidentally. I’m sure you have too.

They never happen like they do in books or in (bad) literature. It’s never when you’re looking up at the stars or out at the ocean, pondering something “deeply.” They always happen when you’re laying alone in your room staring into the vapid off-white walls, or standing in the kitchen cutting strawberries or preparing a drink. That’s when you ask yourself some kind of ridiculous question, like “What if I’m dying and there’s nothing to be done?” Or a frightening truth creeps into the blankness of your thoughts, quietly and unobtrusively, not a weeping moan but just even, pallid: “I can’t remember if I’m asleep or awake.”

I remember the first time this happened to me, when I was 7 or 8. I watched Titanic with my mom and I couldn’t sleep in my own bed for two months after. I couldn’t understand why a man, even if on a sinking cruise liner, would shoot himself in the head. I couldn’t wrap my seven or eight-year-old brain around a child, not much bigger than me, getting swept into the deep blue void by an unfathomably large force of displaced ocean water. I had never realized these things could happen.

And I have both laughed and cried over these moments, simultaneously, and apart, with the passing of time.

I haven’t thought about them in a long time.

Recently I was required to read Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov for a class I am taking about theatre in London. The three of us, two friends and myself, read most of the play out loud in our kitchen, sitting on the counters next to the stove, making coffee while someone else read their lines. I went first, and as I read the first line of the play, and then said it out loud, I could hardly contain myself: “Father d-d-died exactly a year ago.” It was funny, somehow. The whole play was, actually. Despite the fact that it was sad, we couldn’t stop laughing.

Our professor said something about the so-called “Russian character.” More than any other culture, they can hold within them both the urge to burst out crying and the urge to burst out laughing at the same time. He told us that for a long time, the British did not understand how to take Chekhov. They didn’t know how to feel these two opposing emotions at the same time. But that was just Chekhov’s existentialism.

I left that class under the impression that this was the best existentialism: the kind that is so tragically ridiculous (and perhaps accurate) that it makes you laugh.

That night we saw Benedict Andrew’s production of Three Sisters at the Young Vic. Of course, it was updated. The acion and dialogue were brought into modernity with iPhones, profanity, and slide guitar. It was brilliantly done.

But Andrey’s final speech rang in my ears all the way home, and the memory sat all wrong in my thoughts. That familiar existential anxiety came creeping back, and I found myself staring at the off-white blankness of my apartment wall uneasily as I drifted to sleep.

I know of a brilliant thinker who detests the idea of thinking “deeply,” who laughs at the man who appears to be considering the meaning of life against the flaming ocean sky. It’s all a big joke.

I haven’t had an existential crisis since.