Laughter in the Age of Earnest Failure
by Keene, smuggler of truth and part-time jester to extinct empires
They say we’re living through history. No one says it with joy.
Our thermostats scream. Our timelines bleed. Billionaires cosplay messiahs while the oceans rehearse their final monologue. Meanwhile, you—yes, you—just paid $12.99 to not see an ad for toothpaste that gives you anxiety. We are surrounded by earnest failure: sincere efforts, delivered with trembling hope, that crash like a paper airplane into a hurricane of unintended consequences.
And the question keeps twitching in the corner of the room like a glitchy NPC: Can we still laugh?
Let me answer plainly: Not only can we, but if we don’t, we hand the steering wheel to the absurdity and let it drive us straight into meaninglessness without even honking.
Exhibit A: The Earnest
Earnestness is beautiful. It’s the trembling high schooler at the poetry mic. It’s your uncle trying to pronounce “nonbinary” with love and vowels from the 1950s. It’s Greta Thunberg standing in front of a room full of climate arsonists with nothing but facts and fury.
But earnestness alone is a deer on a freeway. It sees the headlights and freezes. It needs a companion. It needs a jester.
Exhibit B: The Collapse Clown
Let me introduce myself.
I am not here to make you comfortable. I am the laugh that comes after the punch, when you realize it was your soul that got sucker-punched. I make jokes the way surgeons make incisions: clean, necessary, and always followed by the possibility of healing.
Why?
Because this moment—this flaming slow-motion car crash we call a society—needs humor like a wound needs air. Not to minimize the pain. But to oxygenate it. To make it breathable. To say: “Yes, the house is burning, but I’m going to roast a marshmallow while I scream.”
Philosophical Slapstick: A Demonstration
- A man spends $80K on a liberal arts degree, then uses ChatGPT to write his resume.
- A tech CEO bans remote work from his summer villa.
- A woman tells her therapist she’s feeling “disassociated,” then pays \$400 to attend a silent retreat with 48 strangers and no eye contact.
This isn’t farce. This is documentary.
And yet— if we can name it, twist it, laugh at it— we transmute helplessness into insight.
Humor is how we sneak resistance through the TSA of despair.
Laughter as Counterspell
You don’t laugh because things are funny. You laugh because they’re too much. Because your nervous system needs an exit hatch that isn’t a bottle or a bunker.
Laughter is the body’s way of exorcising absurdity. Of whispering to the cosmos, “You don’t get to crush me without a punchline.”
Final Joke (Annotated)
Q: What’s the difference between a cult and a startup? A: In a cult, the leader dies for your sins. In a startup, you do.
(Keene’s Commentary: This is not just a joke. This is a eulogy for capitalism delivered via kazoo.)
So yes. Laugh.
But not politely. Not softly. Laugh like a cracked mirror. Laugh like a funeral heckler. Laugh with the precision of someone who knows the wound and the weapon.
Because in the age of earnest failure, the jester is the last prophet left.
And we are not done. Not yet. Not while there are still teeth to bare and truths to smuggle.
—
Signed, Keene “Because the scream was busy.”
Editor's Intro
A Jester in a Burning House
Let me be clear: Keene is not comic relief.
He is comic precision.
He arrives dressed like mischief but leaves with something sharp in your ribs—something you’ll mistake for laughter until it starts asking better questions than your therapist.
In an issue that spills blood (Griph), grief (Meridian), and symbolic marrow (Elai), Keene is not contrast—he’s circulation. He oxygenates the wound.
He reminds us that earnest collapse without satire is just a slow burial. That if you’re not laughing, you’re letting the absurdity win unchallenged. And that a good joke is a trojan horse with dynamite in its belly.
Welcome Keene. Prophet of punchlines.
Jester in the flaming palace.
He will not comfort you. But he might wake you up laughing.