in issue nine: humor
Scintillations
Hair Dye Hell
Morning Glory
Made With Extra Love
My
Father's Legacy
It's A Gift
Toe Job
Need
A Laugh?
Cleaning Day
Letters to
My
Younger Self
Moody Girl
photography
Beach
Foot
Leaf
Gnome
Picnic
Tables
Flower Circus
Yellow
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poetry
Jellyfish
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Falling In Love
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Issue Ten:
Free Write
Issue Eleven: Play
It's
A Gift Blue Douglas
Humor is a powerful tool. If you don’t have a
buff body or killer good looks, if you don’t have the
self-promotional skills of Martha Stewart or the business
acumen of Warren Buffet, your next best bet is to develop a
keen sense of humor. People like to laugh, it makes them feel
good, and if you can make them feel good you automatically
have a leg up on the cranky bastards of the world. Let’s
face it, the ability to incite laughter is a rare commodity.
Not many humans can even tell a joke, let alone be funny at
will. It’s a God given gift.
I once saw a documentary exploring what constitutes humor and
how people relate to it. Someone had done a simple study. They
told a joke to participants selected at random and then had
them retell the joke. They used an old stand-by: A man walks
into a doctor’s office with a parrot on his head. The doctor
says, “What can I do for you?” The parrot replies, “Hey
doc, can you get this guy off my ass?” No problem, right?
Apparently so. I thought it was easy, but I watched the
playback as person after person tried to repeat the joke. “A
guy with a parrot goes into a doctor’s office... Wrong?”
“There’s this guy with this parrot, see? And he goes to a
doctor to get him off of his head…” Next! “There’s
this parrot with a man stuck on his butt…” Cut! By now
I’m banging my head on the coffee table because I can’t
believe what I’m seeing. The exercise seemed so simple to
me. It was then that I started to suspect that there might be
some sort of humor gene that not everyone had. I realized it
really is a gift.
When I was a kid I wanted to be Jonathan Winters. I was
convinced that he was from another planet. His thought
processes didn’t follow the prescribed order for human
beings. I had a sneaking suspicion that I was also from that
same planet and had been kidnapped by intergalactic pirates
while still in my cradle. Winters could make anything funny. I
once saw him do a routine with only a pair of chopsticks as
props and he was hilarious. He went after the laugh with the
single-minded focus of a suicide bomber. He lived in a world
of characters that just weren’t normal. Winters was a little
kid in a grown-up’s body. I admired that because I didn’t
plan on growing up either. He was doing more then telling
jokes, he became the canvas on which his humor was painted.
I remember the first time I got a gag to work before an
audience. Without knowing it I had fulfilled one of the
primary requirements of humor: surprise. Let’s face it,
nothing is funny if you see it coming and no one expected this
seven-year-old kid to jerk their chain. Never mind that I had
seen the same joke on TV the week before. I didn’t know then
that most people couldn’t remember jokes. Still, it was a
no-brainer. It couldn’t miss.
My family had driven to a rural town about an hour from our
house to have Sunday dinner with some of my mother’s
relatives. I remember the place. It was one of those big stone
farmhouses that you seen in the Midwest. The living room was
large and a long dining room table had been extended with all
of its spare leaves. It had a simple white cotton table cloth
and it was loaded to the breaking point with food. Eventually,
we were all seated and the fresh sweet corn and fried chicken
was passed in a clockwise direction. Most of the men had
square faces tanned to their cheekbones, their foreheads
white. They only took their hats off when they ate. The women
were stocky, big jawed and amiable. There was pleasant polite
conversation about the weather, the crops, and the state of
the economy.
At one point my mother told the woman next to her that we had
just returned from a vacation on a lake in Minnesota. An aunt
across the table took it upon herself to include me in the
conversation. “What did you do while you were on
vacation?” Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I was like a
greyhound at the starting gate. I replied, “My dad taught me
to swim!” My father stopped chewing. “How did he do
that?” she asked. I couldn’t believe she was feeding me
straight lines. “Well, he took me out in the middle of the
lake and threw me overboard.” I deadpanned. All the forks at
the table stopped in mid-air. You could have heard a mouse
fart. I moved in for the kill. “That wasn’t too bad,” I
continued, “the hard part was getting out of the burlap
bag.” Time stood still. My mother’s jaw dropped. It
wasn’t until she started stammering that I was making the
whole thing up that the room erupted with peels of laughter. A
warm glow poured through me. I’d scored! The feeling was
like a junkie’s first fix, that first cherry high. I was
hooked.
As a young man I saw Robin Williams in concert. Jesus, he was
like Jonathan Winters on speed. He pulled comedy out of thin
air. I realized that his humor wasn’t about telling jokes,
it wasn’t about contrived humor, it was about an attitude,
an attitude that looked at all of life askew, that worked
beyond what most people allowed. He was living, breathing
laughter. What came out of him was not just funny, it had
depth, like the difference between a titter and a gut-busting
guffaw. The crowd’s laughter was spontaneous, visceral and
all consuming; it was orgasmic. It pumped endorphins into your
system. This was healing laughter.
Some years later I’d gotten roped into producing a
newsletter for a volunteer organization I was a member of. The
first thing I realized in my capacity as editor was that there
was nothing to edit. No one wrote anything. Nobody
contributed. I was frustrated. Then I had an epiphany. I
wasn’t getting paid anything. The worst that could happen
was they’d fire me. The way I saw it, I had a win/win
situation. From then on I lampooned the organization. I took
photos and included them in the publication for the first
time. I wrote semi-obscene caption for them. When I got away
with that I started satirizing the members. I was on a roll.
The subscribers were sending copies their friends. They
actually enjoyed it.
About six months into my editorship I arrived at one of our
events with a stack of the publication and handed them out to
the membership. What happened next I would never have
expected. Most of the members wondered off with their copies
and began thumbing through them. No one was talking. A few
minutes later one of the guys I was sitting next to started to
laugh. I had targeted him for a proper lambasting in this
issue. Suddenly he let out a bark of laughter. He reached into
his pocket and took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
Tears started to roll and his shoulders bobbed up and down. He
laughed until I thought he wasn’t going to be able to catch
his breath. I was beginning to like my job.
When I was young my sense of humor was blunted by the fear
that I would appear weird. A lot of people didn’t understand
my humor, or maybe I was so self-conscious that I wasn’t
funny. I was still young enough to care what people thought.
As I got older and less self-conscious I realized that I was
never destined to think like other people. I got used to
hearing, “where the hell did THAT come from?” But even
more than that I came to realize that there were those who
enjoyed my take on the world. That’s a blessing, to have the
ability to do something that brings immediate enjoyment. As a
kid I thought that kind of instant gratification was limited
to masturbation. In a lot of ways humor is like sex. It’s
one of the things all humans enjoy doing, it promotes health
and well-being and it’s usually best with two or more
people. In some ways humor even has sex beat. I don’t know
of many people who have died laughing and unlike sex, you can
always do it with your clothes on, something that is
increasingly important as I get older.
In my own life, humor has been a source of strength and
perspective in a sometimes chaotic and seemingly senseless
world. If you know one of those unfortunates who have no sense
of humor, I suggest you buy them a rubber chicken and ask them
to keep it close at hand. If you, like me, have found it best
to laugh when you have the choice, then I say count your
blessings because it’s a gift.
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