Bruch Willis’s family announced in March 2022 that the actor suffered from aphasia, a brain disease that affects speech, which has forced him to abandon his Hollywood career. A year later, his loved ones publicly shared that the symptom is a characteristic of the frontotemporal dementia that the actor suffers, a progressive neurological disorder that causes his cognition and behavior to decay day after day, as his daughter Tallulah Willis relates in a text she wrote for Vogue. “I’ve known that something was wrong for a long time,” says the youngest of the actor’s three daughters with Demi Moore. “It started out with a kind of vague unresponsiveness,” writes Tallulah, also an actress. “Later that unresponsiveness broadened, and I sometimes took it personally. He had had two babies with my stepmother, Emma Heming Willis, and I thought he’d lost interest in me.”

Tallulah opens up in the text, admitting that she has “met Bruce’s decline in recent years with a share of avoidance and denial” that she isn’t proud of. “The truth is that I was too sick myself to handle it,” she explains, enumerating the disorders she has experienced throughout her life, including anorexia, depression and ADHD. “While I was wrapped up in my body dysmorphia, flaunting it on Instagram, my dad was quietly struggling. All kinds of cognitive testing was being conducted, but we didn’t have an acronym yet,” she writes in the magazine, remembering the first time that the actor’s illness “hit [her] painfully.” “I was at a wedding in the summer of 2021 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the bride’s father made a moving speech. Suddenly I realized that I would never get that moment, my dad speaking about me in adulthood at my wedding. It was devastating. I left the dinner table, stepped outside, and wept in the bushes,” confesses Tallulah, who last June broke off her engagement with film director Dillon Buss.

After going to a series of rehab centers and trying different therapies to treat her eating disorders and mental illness, the youngest member of the Willis-Moore family believes she now has the tools to be present in all aspects of her life, “especially in my relationship with my dad.” “In the past I was so afraid of being destroyed by sadness, but finally I feel that I can show up and be relied upon,” she writes.

Now, she confesses that she takes “tons of photos” whenever she goes to Bruce’s house — ‘I’m like an archaeologist, searching for treasure in stuff that I never used to pay much attention to” — and that she saves his voice messages on a hard drive. “I’m trying to document, to build a record for the day when he isn’t there to remind me of him and of us,” she explains.

Beyond her father’s state of health, Tallulah also speaks honestly about the difficulties of growing up in a famous family, “struggling to find a patch of light through the long shadows” of her parents. As she writes, her world changed when she was 11 years old after attending an event in New York with her mother, Demi Moore, and Moore’s then-partner, the actor Ashton Kutcher. “I felt awfully grown-up and was very pleased with myself — and I wanted to see if my outfit had made the party pages of any of the style websites. So I opened my laptop and went to the usual places (this was the heyday of Perez Hilton; celebrity kids were fair game), and there I was in my tweenage awkwardness, standing beside my famously beautiful mom. Then I found my way to the comments, hundreds of them, the words just burning off the screen. ‘Wow, she looks deformed. Look at her man jaw — she’s like an ugly version of her dad. Her mother must be so disappointed.’ I remember how deadly silent the room was. I sat reading for two hours, believing that I had stumbled onto a truth about myself that no one had told me because they were trying to protect me. And for years afterward, protecting people right back, I told no one. I just lived with the silent certainty of my own ugliness,” she wrote.

Even so, the actress also recalls the good memories she has with her family, like the recent birth of her niece Louetta, the daughter of her sister Rumer, who has made grandparents of Moore and Willis, for 11 years the most famous couple in film. “There’s this little creature changing by the hour, and there’s this thing happening with my dad that can shift so quickly and unpredictably. It feels like a unique and special time in my family, and I’m just so glad to be here for it,” she says. Lately, her father can be found on the first floor of his home, somewhere in the open space of the kitchen, living room and dining room, or in his office. “Thankfully, dementia has not affected his mobility,” she writes. The advantage of frontotemporal dementia, compared to Alzheimers, she explains, is that it is characterized by lack of language rather than memory loss. “He still knows who I am and lights up when I enter the room,” she writes.

The actor’s third daughter speaks of her father in both the present and past tense: “He was cool and charming and slick and stylish and sweet and a little wacky — and I embrace all that. Those are the genes I inherited from him.” She is reluctant to let go of the hope that she still has in her father. “I’ve always recognized elements of his personality in me,” she says, “and I just know that we’d be such good friends if only there were more time.”

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This week’s biggest story for us came when the results of a government-commissioned inquiry into language and civics tests for permanent residency were presented.

Whenever someone asks me what The Local is, my short answer is that we write about Sweden’s news in English, but the longer answer is that we don’t only take our lead from the Swedish media. They covered this story too, but it was quickly forgotten.

But for many of our readers, this story has a potentially huge impact on their lives – at least for those who don’t yet have permanent residency – so we devoted a lot of attention to these tests and also looked into what they might look like in practice.

READ MORE:

We also asked readers on Facebook what they thought about having to pass language and civics tests for permanent residency, and surprisingly many were positive. That’s also been our experience when we’ve asked readers about similar things in the past.

Many tend to question the spirit in which these tests are proposed – are they really meant as a helpful tool to make people feel more at home in Sweden, or are they just part of a cynical package to make life harder for immigrants? But a lot of people also often argue that asking someone to learn the language and learn about society before deciding to settle down in a place for good is not unreasonable.

Many readers also said that learning Swedish and learning about Sweden had helped them integrate when they moved here, and they encouraged others to do the same.

Some were concerned about the extra administration tests might lead to – both for the state and for the individual. Would they make queues longer at the Migration Agency? And why couldn’t substitutes be accepted – if you’ve already completed Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) classes or studied at university in Swedish, shouldn’t that be enough?

The most common objection from readers who got in touch with us was the sometimes low quality of SFI courses – yes, they’re free, but are they useful or a time-waster? It seems to depend very much on which teacher you end up with.

This comment from Alina, who commented on The Local’s Facebook page, sums up what the majority of people who responded seemed to feel: “I understand the idea, it’s used in other countries too and as long as it is well implemented, it can work.

“On the other hand, SFI is practically the only way to learn Swedish, which in turn is the most important factor in finding a job (unless one lives in a bigger city where it’s easier to find a job where it’s OK to use English) and integrating in society.

“So for me the question is rather: if the government wants to start using these tests, how much is the Swedish state then willing to invest in increasing the quality of SFI classes on a national level, so immigrants would actually have a chance to pass the language test required for receiving permanent residency or citizenship?”

In other news

A group of women in their 90s sat next to me in my café the other day. They were celebrating one member’s 95th (!) birthday and were chatting away in a lovely, thick, southern Swedish accent. Their witty banter made me smile, as did the flowers that kept getting delivered to the café, creating a little indoor garden around their table.

What makes you smile about Sweden? Richard wrote an article this week about the 12 things that make him quietly chuckle. It’s heart-warming reading, I recommend it.

There’s been a lot of talk about Sweden’s stalled Nato application in the past week, and I expect there will be more in the month ahead, as world leaders try to get Turkey and Hungary to drop their objections by the next Nato summit in mid-July. We talk about what’s going on in the latest episode of The Local’s Sweden in Focus podcast.

How would Swedes vote if an election were held today? A new survey has bad news for the current government (although the next election is in 2026, so they’re pretty safe).

Finally, here’s an oldie but goldie from The Local’s archive, which made me laugh when Becky republished it on my day off: Ten phrases you only hear during a Swedish summer.

Thanks for reading,

Emma Löfgren

Editor, The Local Sweden

Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members that gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to your inbox, by going to your newsletter preferences.

Humor can open doors to new worlds and new ways of thinking. This is true now, as it was true before: contrary to popular belief, philosophers have used and studied laughter for centuries. “Philosophy was created as a response to ancient tragedy, and has many connections with the comic,” explains Lydia Amir, professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In books like Philosophy, Humor, and the Human Condition: Taking Ridicule Seriously (2019) and Humor and the Good Life in Modern Philosophy (2015), Amir uncovers a largely forgotten philosophical lineage, in which Socrates poisons himself to mock his executioners, and Plato, famous for expelling comedians from the Republic, defines true comedy as that which unmasks one’s own ignorance.

Along Amir’s guided journey, we learn that Aristotle considered the proper use of laughter a social virtue, and catalogued true wit as the hallmark of a free and honorable person; that the Cynics wandered the streets in broad daylight, holding out a lantern to “search for an honest man;” and that Epicurus advised us to laugh, philosophize and take care of our home, all at the same time.

During the Renaissance, Erasmus wrote a book of jokes. And for Montaigne — who claimed that absurdity was “a uniformly distributed property” — humor allows us to contemplate matters under a new light, which in turn can help us understand how all things have different aspects and different shades. For his part, Spinoza saw in laughter a careful attempt, not to mock, but to understand human passions; while Kant described it as “an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a heightened expectation into nothing.”

According to Amir, the gradual split between philosophy and humor occurred when the former became increasingly enclosed in the confines of the academy, and as a discipline, opted for rationality and a focus on analytical clarity. “Humor is, in essence, ambiguous, and that’s why we chose to leave laughter aside when it came to philosophizing,” Amir explained, in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS.

Now, however, academia appears to be opening its doors to humor. This spring, the Complutense University of Madrid, the Panamerican University in Mexico City, and the University of Kent in England have all hosted academic gatherings on the topic of philosophy and humor. “Traditionally, laughter was considered a matter of popular interest — like emotions: far from the purity of philosophy — but now the discipline is starting to come down off that pedestal,” explains Javier Vilanova, professor of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Complutense University. “The old intellectual prejudice against humor is giving way to an interest in its cognitive and pedagogical strategies, in how we might learn to think through philosophical laughter,” adds Saleta de Salvador Agra, a professor in Philosophy of Language at the same university.

The initiative has been well received by students — an unsurprising development, considering humor’s unique power as a tool of communication, and also, perhaps, given the popularity of the figure of the comedian, who, as Vilanova puts it, analyzes everyday life and takes contradictions to “to the point of absurdity and collapse.”

The success of stand-up comedy offers a good example of Vilanova’s point: A person with a microphone, on a stage, who in a kind of collective catharsis can make an audience laugh using a dose of crude anti-establishment criticism, and poking fun at the everyday miseries of human existence. George Carlin, a star of the genre, used to say that comedy is the popular exploration of truth. Spanish comedian Ignatius Farray tends to agree: “The three fields that focus on searching for truth are philosophy, comedy and crime novels, but, as Socrates knew, and as his method teaches, truth can only be called truth when it emerges out of cooperative dialogue.”

For Farray, author of Meditaciones (2022), the public pays for admission to a stand-up show so that they can peer into the abyss and listen to a comedian say out loud the things we often dare not face ourselves. A bit like philosophers who seek knowledge in solitude. In that space, we are pushed to go “a little past our limits, to find new spaces of freedom, to do the dirty work,” he says.

During that encounter, issues that challenge us as a community can be laid out on the table, like when the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby spoke about the brutal violence she suffered in her homeland for being a lesbian: “I took everything I knew about comedy, cut it up, and created a monster from that corpse,” she told EL PAÍS’s Jaime Rubio Hancock.

With merciless humor, comedians can show us how we are being racist without knowing it, why we never learn from our mistakes, or how to face death. As Farray does, when he points to the “unresolved existential tension” between him and death, and jokes that on his tombstone he plans to write, “I could see it coming,” and that to trick death, just before that fatal hour, he plans to “play dead” so that death will hesitate, as if to say: “Do I have the wrong guy? Am I shaking the same hand twice?”

I read Kierkegaard

For years, the Spanish comedic duo Faemino and Cansado have made audiences erupt in laughter with their celebrated skit: “Qué va, qué va, qué va, yo leo a Kierkegaard (”Hey now, come on, I read Kierkegaard!”). The refrain gets at something deeper than a good laugh. As the Danish philosopher once wrote: “When I was young, I forgot how to laugh… when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing.”

For Kierkegaard, the tragic and the comic are ultimately the same thing: a contradiction. While the former is painful, however, the latter is an incongruity seen in perspective and, therefore, painless. In this way, the person who views something with a sense of humor can find a way out: the person is aware of the contradiction, and doesn’t know what to do about it, but is also no longer tormented by it.

Along these same lines, Amir proposes an ethics of compassion through humor: her thesis is that in human beings, all desires contradict each other, and are incongruent with reality, which leads to a tragic situation where we react with complete rigidity. The comic sensibility, on the other hand, knows how to see and live with duality and contradiction. “Realizing this irresolvable incoherence can bring us peace,” says Amir, who invites us all to adopt a self-reflective posture, by ridiculing ourselves (“but gently, and with forgiveness”). A form of salvation — precarious, holy — just within our reach.

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