John Wesley Wayland

Sometimes only one heart need stop for a thousand others to fill with sadness. Such a heart was John Wayland's. And such hearts were our hearts. We always knew that one day John Wayland would die, we just didn't know it had already happened tomorrow.

"Mother is dead" was the famous punchline to my favorite sketch of his. How melancholy that line seems today, referring as it now does to dying, in light of John being dead. Today he could well finish the sketch with the utterance "John is dead." But he can't, because he is not alive anymore. And it is not a funny line, not as funny as "Mother is dead." And, for John, writing things that were not funny, that were meant to be funny, was not funny. It was tragically not funny, for him.

If you were born, like I was, in the 70s and are part of the generation now in its early twenties, to which noone cares to market anything, all of this is the saddest thing in the history of the world, as sad as a melancholy clown. Which in many ways, for me, John was. Is it only me that wants to fall on my face on the ground and swallow mud? As news of John's death spread around the world people paused to remember his jokes and let tears of laughter mingle with tears of grief. It was like taking a hit in the balls and seeing someone else get hit in the balls, all at the same instant.

In New York, hot-dog vendors looked at their hot dogs and laughed. In Afghanistan, Mullah and Marine shared chuckles before continuing their conversion of humanity to meat.

There were other members of the Oval who were more important. But they are all alive, and they haven't died, as John so ironically has, after the events of September 11. Art Schramm was the omniscient beauty. The Kalanithi Brothers were the Ringling Brothers. Ritik had the whip-smart humor, which sometimes cut even his own cheek. Robin Moroney was the Englisher. But John was the citizen, a clown of the Declaration of Independence.

He was funny in a uniquely American way. As funny as his ancestor John Brown was, who tried to foment rebellion before the civil war and died. Funny in the way that Oliver North is and Napoleon is not. John's work raises the same smile that the Whisky Rebellion, in which thousands died, raises.

"Before John joined the group, we didn't know fucking anything. He was the rudder. Before then we headed somewhere new every week, and got nowhere," Dax Bamberger said. Now we have lost our rudder. Goodbye John, Mother is dead.