Humor

Humor

Samuel Bird

I was tired of the life that I had lived and the culture I had been surrounded by. I was done with all the conflict and cheap ways of getting ahead. I had worked hard and traded my delinquency for some simple honors that were a soothing balm to my sense of self. During this time of aggressive personal change, I was walking to an appointment when I saw a woman stressedly moving boxes from her house in the rain into her vehicle. Her widened eyes and quick motions demonstrated her concern. I went about my day and returned back that way as quickly as I could. As I was preparing for, she was still carrying boxes and was not slowing down. I introduced myself, talked about her situation, and offered to help her with the most dignity and pride I could leave her with. She looked confused and like this was a question she had not prepared for. I shut my brain off as I prepared for some manual labor. In her stress, she must have been very forgetful. I would ask what was in a box or what the story behind a possible heirloom antique could be, and she would not remember the story. The house had a unique stone design that I asked her about its origination and care, but she must have forgotten as well. Between passing her in the hallway, carrying a new series of personal effects, she would tell me another part of her tragedy. A family member had betrayed her, or perhaps a lover. She had lost her job, but maybe the job she had was asking her to change location. I am used to talking to people who do not think in coherence and I don’t mind letting them live out their delusion to a degree. She complained about her landlord and asked me to keep quiet because she didn’t want to get yelled at by them. I also didn’t feel like conflict and did as she asked. After a while of this and getting decently soaked by the rain, I saw a face hiding behind a bush. She had a scared look and eyes bigger than the first lady. She waved for me to come over while gesturing for me to be quiet. “Young man, do you know what you are doing?” “Oh yes, I am helping this lady move.” “Move?” “Yes ma’am. She looked stressed and I wanted to help her.” “How could you do that?” “Oh, are you her landlord? She just wants to get out of here with the least amount of conflict.” “No that’s my house.” “As in, you are renting it to her.” “No, that is my house.” “How did her stuff get in your house then?” “It didn’t, that is my stuff you were carrying.” My stomach sank with realization as the woman’s ability to not contradict herself and form a complete sentence was pretty convincing. “You seem like a nice young man and I didn’t want you to get in trouble. However, the police are on the way here to arrest her. I’ve met her before. She is... She is not well and I don’t feel brave enough to confront her myself. She must have tried to get it all stolen before I got home.” “I am so sorry! I had no idea. I... I can help you move the stuff back when you get this sorted out.” “You are fine. I can tell you really were just helping her. Tell you what, when I get my house back, are you hungry?”

How did you find this story? The words were one thing, but their instance in your mind took up new properties of a house that varied from the one I am referring to. What did this story mean to you? By this I mean, what values did the emergent properties of this story give you? While the stakes were high and there was some degree of pain, it wasn’t quite a tragedy. If you are like me, you perhaps found this to be a comedy. There is irony in my effort to get my life together just in time to rob a house without my knowledge. This humor is a powerful way to respond to the world around us. Humor is the skill to find even the terrible valuable as at least you can laugh at it. The only series of events and facts to those who can laugh well is the good and the funny. I wonder if someone were to read my works, the different effects that it would have. I also think about how accurate of a character I am portraying as it is filtered through my skewed and damaged sense of self. I think one thing that you would not take away from my writing that plays a large part of my life, is how silly I am. When I am fortunate enough to be in a social role that doesn’t crush my soul, I take on different characters that are extreme in their qualities to the extent the absurdity is put on display. With my family, who I don’t feel safe catching glimpses of my soul, I have made this character who is very proud and think he can do no wrong. In this, my faults are then bare at their feet as an offering. If I beat myself to flagellation, they can’t. I love to tell stories where misery is put as weak foe or characters who I voice have their illogical thought processes broken down. This sense of humor varies from the humor of my day. While there is some self awareness, the foundation of the joke is not that all is fraught and I am pointing my finger in mockery at the world. Instead, my humor comes from a deeply sincere point where I seek to engage with the world, but find myself completely unable in every attempt I start. My humor finds that point I start and fate begins. This humor takes those horrors that come to me in the night and steals away their claws. That demon that sits to my side while my body and mind are caught somewhere between waking and sleeping has a new light to sit under. In that wretched moment she fills me with fear, but once I can muster my faculties to end this, I will find a time to laugh. Where are your thorns and thistles? Where are your fangs and horns? How can you cut me when with eyes shut up in laughter, I can’t see you? I gaze into the gaping horror and hear the echo and bellow of my chuckle. Why not? Who will stop me from finding all as hilarious as I do? The world is, and oddly specifically so. Why did we agree to wear these funny little clothes? Why do we take some random things so seriously? Why does gravity do this? Why does light do that? Why is knowledge so fleeting? The world around us is not properly basic and with its random complexity, I find it absurd. Not with bitterness or cruelty do I find it so. Like a circus of monkeys driving little cars and putting on little suits and ties, while I find it silly, I find it admirable and adorable. Look how earnest these little humans are. See how much they try in such a world that gives them too much to sense and yet does not make sense. I can see a face I had never before, and talk about some fact that pains us both and they will laugh. I will make a smiling friend in our misery and make his life the better. This person’s Esse Maxim is shifted as the way he finds the same facts is one where he can at least giggle about it. Those things that would hurt too much to explore like our inadequacies, conflicts, and woes, we are able to navigate freely in a world of playfulness. What an honor it is to make another laugh. 

We have our facts and their values. From being, doing, and emergent properties we find beauty, goodness, and meaning and with their grounding, we have factuality and reason. However, these values we reach out to the sky for often escape our grasp. What of the ugly, bad, meaningless, and unreasonable? Ancient traditional and organic wisdom allows me to co-exist with these facts and even make friends in my complaints about them as we laugh. Would you like to learn my biggest secret in how to be funny? Firstly, help people navigate their pains with genuine concern via humor. Secondly, use intentional logical fallacies to make fallacious ideas clear. Finally, don’t take yourself too seriously as you do so. The more I learned about logic, the more that I saw that much of what I find funny is demonstrating an informal fallacy like division, ad hominem, or tu quoque. Even to those that have never seen a logical proof, they are able to identify the mistake at hand and my erroneous character is able to approximate what makes sense to do, by how clearly non-sensical its direction of thought is. For this reason, I see humor as a powerful manifestation of one of the many possible ways cognitive prowess can be represented. Find a funny friend, and you will likely find a smart one as well, though the way that intellect could be manifested could my surprising. Often, causal relationships that are deductive one way, can be inductive in the obverse direction. This may be a little controversial, but so are most of the jokes I say in private. For this reason, it is also the case that a smart friend would be more likely to be funny, but as you may note with us who have brains that run on, the way we are humorous may not be in ways we are aware of. Much of my life was lived so that I would have a funny story to tell. In the middle of something that would scar my psyche, I would do something that I thought would make a laugh when I would retell that story. I often hear that some tragedy is off-limits to humor. I do believe there is value in us creating something we treat as sacred and there is a fine line between making light of pain and making a fool of someone. However, I also think that that which we can’t laugh about, we certainly can’t heal from, not to say that the laughter would necessitate the healing. I had a medical crisis that was not helped by my dark humor about the circumstance. However, when it was time to move on and allow my selfhood to exist into a new and unplanned future, I couldn’t move on until I was able to laugh. I don’t ask you to remove any of the gravity of the human experience. We are in every moment dying and in doing so slip into the last finality. We know nothing, can do about the same, and have hopes and aspirations that don’t align with these brutal facts. The weight of being will still be on your shoulders but take with you this lightness that is the hilarity of realizing the separateness we have to that which ails us. Let your engagement not be impeded and your sincerity maximized. However, that face goes more confidently into the unknown who can keep a grin upon it? I racked my head thinking of which story to share in this to encapsulate all those tales I have had my audience cackling. However, in great irony, I couldn’t remember any of them. The frustration turns to a small smirk on my face that the comedian who writes can’t write about his comedy. So what of all those little moments and stories you didn’t get to view? I will often say a joke for my own sake. My friend, I hope you have problems bad enough to laugh about and the wisdom to do so.