Lines in the Sand with Michal Viewegh: Humor as an Emergency Brake

What if humor is not a way to have fun, but a way to survive the moment when life takes control away from you? What happens when a ruptured aorta, clinical death, or memory loss remind you that you don't always have full command of your own mind - and the only choice left is to decide how you will talk about it?

Michal Viewegh has written over forty books. He has experienced a ruptured aorta, clinical death, and a period when he couldn't remember the previous evening by morning. He has written about these experiences with both sensitivity and humor - sometimes directed at himself. He borrowed a phrase from French writer Romain Gary: humor is a way to neutralize reality when it's about to attack you.

This evening is not about laughing at everything that happens to us, but about whether humor can change our relationship to what we cannot change - to illness, fear, our own vulnerability, or loss of control. October's Lines in the Sand will focus on humor as a defense, not as entertainment - on what an experience that brings you to your knees does to a person, and what it means to have the ability to transform it into a story we can eventually laugh about.