'Lose All Your Blues Laughing at Life'

On the way to Costco I was listening to the “Kansas City Sessions” recorded by Lester Young and other Basie alumni in 1938 and 1944. Young gets top billing but the recordings virtually define ensemble playing (Freddie Green, Dicky Wells, Buck Clayton, Hot Lips Page, et. al.). In the latter set is a song I listened to several times because of its title: “Laughing at Life.” It was composed in 1930 by Bob and Cornell Todd, with lyrics by Charles and Nick Kenny. It seems never to have quite reached standard status though recorded by Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, Susannah McCorkle, even Frankie Laine. The lyrics are conventional pop blandness but that would have made sense in the first year of the Great Depression: “Lose all your blues laughing at life.”

Pop lyrics are not poetry, despite what Bob Dylan’s acolytes may insist, but they sometimes carry time-released depth-charges of emotion. The Young & Co. version is recorded without lyrics. When I got home I listened to several recordings with vocals, and found the words expressing a familiar theme: “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” The Kenny brothers write:

“Live for tomorrow, be happy today

Laugh all your sorrows away

Start now and cheer up

The skies will clear up

Lose all your blues laughing at life”

A verbal placebo? An opiate of the masses? Perhaps. But stirring in its own small way. A good reminder that laughter is the polar (bipolar?) opposite of earnestness, resentment, self-righteousness and failure of imagination. “Laughing at Life” reminded me of what Max Beerbohm has to say in “Laughter” (And Even Now, 1920):  

“There is no dignity in laughter, there is much of it in smiles. Laughter is but a joyous surrender, smiles give token of mature criticism…And you will have observed with me in the club-room that young men at most times look solemn, whereas old men or men of middle age mostly smile; and also that those young men do often laugh loud and long among themselves, while we others -- the gayest and best of us in the most favourable circumstances -- seldom achieve more than our habitual act of smiling. Does the sound of that laughter jar on us? Do we liken it to the crackling of thorns under a pot? Let us do so. There is no cheerier sound. But let us not assume it to be the laughter of fools because we sit quiet. It is absurd to disapprove of what one envies, or to wish a good thing were no more because it has passed out of our possession.”