I completed the manuscript for this book during the COVID-19 pandemic of Spring 2020. I happened to have been in Italy, where people spent almost three months in unusually restrictive “lockdown.” Connected with the outside through digital publications and social media, Italy and the world responded to the pandemic not only with recognition and empathy regarding the unfolding tragedy but also with pervasive and inventive humor. Immediately after rules for “social distancing” were promulgated, an Italian cartoon appeared in which a man and a woman are chatting each other up while an official kneels between them measuring the distance. When handshakes and hugs were discouraged, comic videos popped up on YouTube with individuals touching elbows or shoes in dance-like choreography; indeed, YouTube became loaded with hilarious skits, send-ups, and funny talk-show bits related to the pandemic. My old roommate from college, who kept an e-mailing list for social and political jokes, used it for the pandemic almost every day. Comedy, of course, cannot remove sickness and death, as Berowne acknowledges, but it can help us endure, and, even more, it can provide the shift in perspective that allows us to engage with something in a new way, to reimagine it, just as a joke can alter the momentum and possibilities of a casual conversation or a committee meeting. Shifting into the comic moment requires us to put our political, social, economic, religious, or other differences aside. We just might come back from it having changed our attitudes, and we might find ourselves, later, in the wake of the moment of comic enchantment, thinking more deeply still about matters....
Virtual ethics committee meeting during the COVID-associated lockdown – Madras Diabetes Research Foundation Experience