CHRONICLING A TOUGH TIME, WITH HUMOUR
Josh Freed's COVID columns, gathered in a new book, make for a vivid social history
“I was terrified,” said Josh Freed. “There's no other way to put it.”
The popular longtime Montreal Gazette humour columnist was talking about his state of mind in early 2020, when he was feeling extreme apprehension at the prospect of writing about COVID -19. He had encountered the subject at a time when it was little more than a rumour to many Canadians: holidaying in Southeast Asia, where he found to his surprise that he was sometimes the only unmasked person in the vicinity. Not long after, when the virus arrived in North America (and elsewhere) with a vengeance, it was clear to Freed that he would have to address it. But how does one write humorously about a subject that would appear to preclude the very idea of humour?
“It's a real balancing act,” Freed said last week in his apartment overlooking Jeanne-mance Park. “You're trying to figure out where you can go and where you can't go with it. You don't want someone whose mother is dying in hospital to read what you've written and get hurt and angry. Ideally everyone should laugh.”
The answer, for Freed, came with a reminder of a first principle: the idea of humour not as an indulgence, but as an escape valve, a coping mechanism.
“We were all living a crazy new life,” he said. “And I couldn't help but notice that when we talked about it among ourselves, we talked about it as something that was funny. So I just thought, `I'm going to write it as I see it.' So I wrote the first column and kind of sat back and waited for a wave of people to yell at me, saying `You can't make fun of this!' But I was astonished at the response. Nobody, not one person, wrote to say `You shouldn't be doing this.' Sure, they may have disagreed with certain things I said, about the government and its COVID response, for example. But not about using humour.”
As for the type of message he was getting, Freed recalled, “Many were along the lines of `I'm sitting alone in my house, I don't know what to think, and reading you makes me feel I'm not alone. It's nice to be able to laugh at my problems and not be scared.' I started to realize that this was the best thing I could do for people.”
Freed was struck not only by the positivity of the responses, but the sheer volume — not just from Montreal and environs, but nationally and internationally.
“I've always tried to respond to every letter or email from readers,” he said. “But very soon it became apparent that it would be impossible in this case. There were just too many. It was a reminder that there has always been a close relationship between anxiety and comedy. The last time I had a response like this was during the 1995 referendum.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, of the 50-plus Gazette columns Freed has written since March 2020, not one hasn't at least alluded to COVID.
“The reasons for that are simple,” he said. “One was the overwhelming response. The other was that, let's face it, COVID is a subject that has touched everything. It has dominated life, made everything else feel irrelevant. I know it was all I wanted to read about, so it made perfect sense to write about it, too.”
It also makes perfect sense to gather those columns into a book. The result, newly published, is Postcards From Pandemica: Our Crazy Covid Years (John Aylen Books, 163 pages, $25). A collection of nearly every COVID -related column Freed has written, the book turns out to be more than a mirth-inducing provider of perspective on the past 18 fraught months. It's also a piece of popular history — exactly the kind of book that, years or even decades after the fact, will serve as an ideal time capsule for this unprecedented chapter in the human experience.
For Freed, a weekly column turned out to be the perfect forum for writing about a world that was changing at a dizzying rate. Gathering those columns into a chronologically arranged book provides a built-in narrative drive: you can dip into Freed's instalments at random, sure, but read the book in sequence and you may well find yourself racing through as if it were an airport thriller. Standard column length imposes a structural discipline: an introduction, body and snappy conclusion are required within roughly 800 words. That kind of concision is a lot harder than Freed makes it look, and he pulls it off time and time again.
A fine balance of the comic and the sobering is struck. Passages such as the one where Freed offers advice on how to handle those rare distanced conversations with neighbours (“You may worry you'll have nothing to say, since you've done nothing all year. But neither have they. Don't ask if they've seen anyone lately, because they'll just answer no.”) blend nicely with occasional bouts of judicious venting, as in the entry for Boxing Day, 2020, where the preceding months are bid adieu with “So long, you diseased, infected, ruthless, murderous, boring, terrifying, endless year.”
Moments of recognition for readers will be many. Freed captures the collective emotional experience of lockdown and domestic isolation — the feeling that time had somehow been turned inside out to the point where the days of the week began melding into a single entity he calls “Blursday.”
“Normally our big life emotions are fairly spaced out — weddings, funerals,” he said. “But COVID meant we were having big emotions every week. What happened in March could feel like a whole different lifetime by April or May. Our sleeping patterns got all out of whack, our eating habits changed, our hair got longer and more ridiculous looking. Even when you think of something like the Vaccine Passport, it's like we're going to a foreign country every day without leaving home.”
In some ways, Freed found the new reality suited his personality.
“Some of my friends dealt with COVID by not talking about it,” he said. “I'm the opposite. I couldn't stop talking about it. I became obsessed with things like the case count in Italy as compared to the case count in Calgary. But then, I've always been a facts person. The more information I have the safer and more in control I feel, in my writing and in my life.”
Looking ahead, does Freed anticipate a kind of POST-COVID decompression period, when it might be hard to write about anything else?
“Well, it's like overcoming an addiction. I'm kind of detoxing, gradually learning to control my impulse to write about it. Even so, it's always here, and it probably will be for at least a couple more years. It's becoming an endemic as opposed to a pandemic, something we're just going to have to learn to live with.”
How does he think he'll look back on this time, and the experience of chronicling it?
“It was psychotherapeutic.
I liked writing it, people liked reading it, so it's win-win. Besides, it's not like there was anything else to do.”
It turns out his column wasn't the only thing keeping Freed busy. He's also got a part in Four Anglos Surviving the Covid Apocalypse, a multimedia theatre production directed by Ellen David featuring the songs of musical comedy duo Bowser and Blue and cartoons curated by Terry Mosher (Aislin). The elevator pitch, said Freed, would be something like “You gasped, you vaxxed, and now it's time to laugh.”
“It's an attempt to create a cathartic experience in which you can sit back and watch your last two years go by in song and cartoons.”
Nearly all of the collaboration for the production was done by Zoom; the first actual in-person rehearsal opportunity wasn't until early this month.
“I come out, do a rap, then Bowser and Blue come out,” Freed said of the show's structure. “They've been unemployed, as in unable to perform, for all these months, but they've been writing COVID songs all this time — some of them very funny, some of them very moving. It's all done to a backdrop of COVID cartoons for which Terry secured the rights for his new book (Aislin's Favourite Covid Cartoons from Around the World). At our public rehearsal in Knowlton, people were fighting back tears at certain points.
“I'm essentially the straight man in this setup,” he said. “My linking raps will inevitably overlap with my columns to some degree. Terry's visuals, and of course Bowser and Blue's songs, are the real focal point. We're thinking of it as a renaissance project — a chance for people to come out and start living again.”