Maeve Higgins: Celebrating the sheer silliness of our otherwise banal existence

I have been reminded how funny it can be to commit yourself to deliberately small and pointless actions

Every issue bar one of Jennifer Mills News was on display at the art exhibition in Brooklyn.

I HAVE a deep respect for silliness. Someone who makes me laugh without attaching any meaning to what they’ve said is positively heroic. And there is nothing I admire more than commitment to a bit.

There is such power in nonsense, in resisting using a joke to parlay into something that might mean something, in stopping yourself from ever uttering the words “but seriously, folks”.

Last week I went to a small exhibition space in Brooklyn and was reminded how funny it can be to commit yourself to deliberately small and pointless actions. 

These actions become funnier the longer you commit to them.

A case in point is the weekly newsletter Jennifer Mills News, created and produced by Jennifer Mills, an artist and radio producer, for the past 21 years.

She fits three columns onto an A4 page and features only the most mundane headlines and stories from and about her own life.

Headlines like “Woman Finds 4 Lost Chapsticks In One Day” are followed up with a paragraph detailing where the chapsticks showed up (mainly pockets and bags), followed by a reaction quote from herself, “It was just so good to see them all again.” 

Through March, every issue of Jennifer Mills News but one (Mills can’t find it) was on display on the walls of the Brick Aux Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

I went to the exhibit and found myself really laughing at how funny and silly the whole endeavour was and marvelling at how resolutely Mills stuck with it.

Jennifer Mills writes about the small, pointless moments and has stuck with it.

Mills began the newsletter when she was 17, using her high school’s computer lab to make a mockup of a real newspaper. Today, she distributes the newsletter by email. 

In the beginning, she left paper copies in bathroom stalls in her school and later at her university. An earlier issue from 2004 carries the headline “Girl Falls Over at Skateland, Other Girl Falls Over First Girl.” 

It opens with “Jennifer Mills, 19, a student at Concordia College in Moorehead, recently went skating at Skateland” and then briefly relays a typical pile-up on a skating rink, including the plaintive quote, “My wrist hurts.”

That is about as exciting as it gets; most stories in Jennifer Mills News are about incidents with much less drama than a sore wrist after a fall. The moments recorded in these newsletters for 21 years are not big and important. Neither are they comical in the loud and obvious way favoured by typical comedy writers.

These moments are sometimes a reflection of some slightly neurotic reaction; they’re usually completely banal, and almost always, they are relatable. 

These are moments we all have throughout each day; wondering if the food we have in the fridge is still safe to eat after three days, finding out we have been standing in the wrong queue, and getting frustrated by a can opener. 

We usually allow these moments to pass us by, if not unnoticed, at least unremarked upon.

Not Jennifer Mills — these small, pointless moments in her life are memorialised in a strange little PDF sent around to people who are most likely over-extended and distracted.

It makes you wonder if anything matters at all if perhaps Kurt Vonnegut was right when he said we are here on Earth to fart around. But of course, Vonnegut wrote that dictum in a book he went on to publish.

And Jennifer Mills writes her newsletter week after week, diligently sticking with the most prosaic scenarios as news no matter how many big or sad things were, no doubt, also happening in her life. 

Expressing creativity

Like all great comedy minds, Vonnegut and Mills are doing more than farting around. They are expressing their creativity; they are committing over and over again to seeing the idiocy all around us, then acting on their very human impulse to share what they see with others. Lucky us!

In his memoir, My Lives, the great (and often hilarious) writer Edmund White writes about his lifelong pursuit of lightness. He loves joking and having a good time; he craves these all-too-rare moments of levity. 

As he gets older and life becomes more difficult for him and those around him, with loss, illness, and heartache all inevitably catching them up, he writes that he feels like a spider monkey swinging through the trees in a world that is more and more deforested.

“If I look hard I can still find moments of frivolity, of silvery silliness, of merry complicity, even of pure cross-eyed joy. Till now, I can usually spot the next branch, but sometimes it’s quite a stretch.”

Jennifer Mills News is one such branch. Can you imagine being that next branch, holding steady despite the battering rain and whipping wind? What a satisfying victory over all this mess that would be!