When I was younger, I thought I had a great sense of humor. Not that I was so funny, though from what people have told me, I guess I was. But I mean that I could find humor in so many situations, and appreciated a wide range of humor, from the very physical to the most wry.
I didn’t laugh at quite everything though. I remember when I was in 7th grade, the school put on The Pirates of Penzance. Having no singing or dancing talent, I got to be the prompter. The other kids were so good, I didn’t get to prompt. But on opening night, I did get to see, from backstage, Mary Ellen Kennedy’s (name changed) face when, at the end of an difficult dance number, she jumped 4 feet into the air and did an amazing straddle, splitting her pants and exposing her butt (and, thankfully, underwear) to her whole world. The audience roared. Her face turned beet red and her eyes welled with tears as she raced off stage. I felt her pain. I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t a joke I could share, because she and her embarrassment just weren’t funny to me.
I never did get laughing at someone else’s misfortune. I recently learned there’s a German word for it: schadenfreude. I knew someone a long time ago who seemed to almost take glee in bad things happening to other people (although he denied it). It didn’t even matter if he liked them or not. It was as if life was a see-saw and as long as it was happening to someone else, it wouldn’t happen to him.
When I was in high school, and my sense of myself was forming, I would sit and drink coffee with my dad, listening to Imus in the Morning on NBC Radio before I headed off to school. I liked Imus because he was outrageous, yet intelligent. I guess I saw myself that way too, though I’m 100% sure nobody else got outrageous and intelligent out of obnoxious and smart ass. At this stage of my life, I was “in” on the jokes and got the adult humor. I felt so grown up.
When my dad died the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, my sense of humor went into hibernation, but it wasn’t more than a month or so before my brother, sister, and I were back at our routines, skits, and impromptu busting on each other, often with the sole intention of making our mother laugh again, or at least smile.
My college years and well into my early years of working were all about laughing and having a good time. My friends and I kidded each other constantly, and at work, I would jump out of closets to scare my colleagues, or pretend to snort cocaine (Sweet N Low packets) off my desk. A lot of the humor was physical, with real belly laughs a constant companion.
I noticed the first dramatic shift in my sense of humor thanks to Howard Stern. I didn’t like him as much as Imus in the Morning, but I thought I was hip for listening to him during afternoon drive time in the early 80’s. Until one afternoon when one of the news reports was about a nun being raped and crosses cut into her body by the attacker. Stern found a way to make jokes about it. I never tuned in to his program again.
And while I was still laughing and clowning around a lot, as my 20s raced by, I started to realize I was laughing at less and less.
At one point, around the time I turned 30, my then husband said I had no sense of humor.
Rather than defending myself, I reflected on what he said, because I could see that my sense of humor had, indeed, morphed. Life was getting harder and wasn’t really fun as much as it had been. And as I got older (matured?) I just found humor in even fewer places.
I know some of the change occurred because I was moving away from an emotional core and to a more intellectualized response to my surroundings. I recognized that many jokes are at someone else’s expense. When the person is “in” on it and laughing along, that’s one thing, but so many comedians seemed to be targeting groups of people, often women. And what they were saying just didn’t ring true: I didn’t find women to be bad drivers, bad decision makers, or weak. I didn’t find Mexicans to be lazy or black people to be stupid or white men to be boring. So I just found the humor off-base. I didn’t think dwarves or fat people deserved to be targeted because they were not taller or thinner. In order for something to be funny to me, I had to see some truth in it. I stopped seeing truth in what often passed for comedy.
Going back about 7 years when my daughter, who is a natural blonde, was about 13 and struggling with her changing body and the world around her, she found herself at the butt of dumb blonde jokes. I’m sorry to say I was the one telling them sometimes, partly because she was a goofy kid who was a blonde (the dumb blonde jokes were just so handy) and partly because my family has a long history of finding the things about yourself that you don’t like--or don’t see--and using humor to make you deal with them. Some call that merciless teasing, I call it love. Note to self: perhaps some therapy is in order…
Moving right along…
So one day Rachel said she didn’t think dumb blonde jokes were funny, because they were, at their core, objectifying blondes. When I thought about it, I realized that she was right. Every one one of the jokes positioned the blonde woman as an idiot, but when I thought about it, I couldn’t think of any blondes who were accurately represented by the jokes. So she was right, the jokes were perpetuating a stereotype that was working against women, in this case, blondes. She formed a group on Facebook called BAA (Blondes Against Abuse) and while no one joined and she didn’t post more than once or twice, I got her point and haven’t told a dumb blonde joke since.
A few years later, I decided to take the kids on a non-flying vacation to a resort in the Poconos. The first night, wasn’t feeling great and didn’t want to harsh their fun, so I told them they could go to the comedy club without me. They were 16 and 13 at the time. They were gone for about an hour, coming back to the room way sooner than I expected. They were both a little quiet and I thought something bad had happened. “Why are you back so early?” I asked.
“Aren’t Polish jokes racist?” Wil asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the comedian just kept telling Polish jokes. And Rachel and I didn’t get why he was doing that. What’s funny about Polish people?”
Wow. My head was spinning. So here we are in 2008, the world is supposed to be more civilized and politically correct, and this guy is telling jokes at the expense of an ethnic group and a room full of people are laughing.
We collectively decided we didn’t like the resort and checked out that night.
I think their dad would use this as an example of me not having a sense of humor.
I don’t know, maybe I do take things too seriously. Maybe running a business and raising children through this horrible time in our history, where so much of what we were taught to believe in is just flat out wrong and in some cases, nothing short of evil, has made me too serious and hyper-sensitized.
Or maybe it’s just that I expect humor to make me laugh and not make me cringe. Maybe too many comedians, in their never-ending quest to outdo each other, keep hitting the wrong nerve, making us cringe before laughing, so that laughing is the release of the cringe response, not a healthy laugh that is a direct result of the joke.
I like humor that resonates and pulls people together. I like Chris Rock, for the most part, because he tells stories that are funny and real. I like Christopher Titus and Kathleen Madigan for the same reasons. They tell stories about their families, and you feel like, “Yeah, I’ve got those people in my world too.” And then you laugh together.
I was never a fan of the Don Rickles school of humor. Or Joan Rivers. They poke fun at individuals and claim it’s in good fun, but isn’t someone, whether a person in the audience or a celebrity, hurt a bit, even just a little bit, by their barbs? Their humor seems to single someone out and make him or her a “them” so that Don or Joan can be the “us” with the audience. Singling someone out seems rude and cruel, no matter who the “them” happens to be.
My favorite comedian is Stephen Wright. He doesn’t make fun of people, he just says funny things.
And Jon Stewart, I can’t get enough of him. He and his team nail it nightly. They find the ridiculousness in the world around it and show it for what it is by making the lunacy so undeniable. He never ever seems mean spirited, no matter who he’s lampooning.
On the other hand, I find nothing funny about Daniel Tosh. My ex-husband and son think he’s a riot. Maybe if I were back at 16 again, I would too. But to me, he’s just not funny. Wil was sharing a clip with me the other day, where Tosh is talking about which actresses older than him he would “do.” Who the hell is he to say he would “do” anyone? What sets him up as someone who can choose who to “do?” The entire way he phrases it objectifies the women. And who the hell would want to “do” him? Arrogant asshole, let’s see the list of actresses who would do him. Perhaps that would be funny.
That’s another thing about comedy. I felt myself getting angry as I was writing about Tosh--it seems a lot of comedians aren’t really nice people. “Comedy” doesn’t always come from a happy place, and it doesn’t always leave people in a happy place. But given a choice, these days I prefer it to come from a good place and take me to a better one.
