Old age is excellent for outrage: comedian

Not for her prime time appearances but rather for her age, at 67, Mary Walsh is in her prime.

“Let all of us wrinkled, radical women start working together to narrow down gender equity,” she said in a speech Friday. “Let’s take back the night, the morning, the mid-day and the afternoon and the evening. In fact, let’s take back the whole goddamn day.”

Walsh, a Newfoundlander and former cast member on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, spoke at ideacity, a conference in Toronto with 15-minute speeches on health, technology and other topics of interest to its host, Moses Znaimer. Walsh happens to be funny, known for wearing a princess warrior costume as a character on 22 Minutes, but in her speech on ageism and misogyny, she never minded standup and instead stood up.

“Old age is an excellent time for outrage,” she said. “We are the boomers 3.0, and this time, let us finally build that shining city on the hill, our new Jerusalem of gender, racial and economic justice and equality for all.”

Her speech was part warrior cry, part literature review. She cited studies on demographics and subjective well-being — they say the world is getting older; they say aging brings happiness (“I keep saying, ‘they,’” she admitted, “but I keep saying that so you don’t think I’m just making this s--t up.”)

Researchers are also reframing old age. “What we like to focus on is changing the narrative that is so prevalent: that seniors cost money, that there’s the silver tsunami or the grey wave,” says Christa Hoy, research manager with the Active Aging Research Team at the University of British Columbia.

That older people are the happiest people isn’t a new finding, as the eponymous argument of Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Happiness Curve: Why life gets better after 50. Walsh was once told that her twenties would be the best part of her life, at which point she thought, as she recalled, “Gentle German Jesus, if this is the best time of my whole life, I’m just going to go hang myself right now.”

Right now, she said, she feels liberty in no longer striving to be the object of men’s desire. “Our youth-obsessed culture is constantly telling us that if we’re not young, if we’re not hot and we’re not glowing that we don’t matter,” she said. “But old age does matter … I’m now spending a lot of time in the present and dealing with realities — the reality of work done, of love loved, and, of course, of suffering suffered.”

She has suffered from pneumonia since childhood and had to pause her speech to cough, supporting her point — that people should lean in to social issues even if leaning on canes.