Candor compels me to admit I laugh at my own jokes. And few things make me laugh harder than when I tell a joke and nothing happens. I’ll give you two examples.
In 1978, I had a job selling clothes for a now-defunct Retail outlet in Westfarms, a mall on the West Hartford–Farmington town line in Connecticut. During a break, I went to a concession that sold bagels. I ordered one toasted, with cream cheese. While the young woman behind the counter was preparing my bagel, she apparently mistook me for her biographer because she started relating the chapter about all the supplements she took.
She ended the diatribe with, “And I take a lot of iron.”
“Well,” I said, “that explains your magnetic personality.”
Nothing happened. Not a chuckle. Not a smile. Crickets. I had everything I could do to keep my composure as I collected my bagel. I was still in hysterics when I got back to the store in which I worked.
More recently, Anne and I went to dinner at Red Fox, one of our haunts in Middletown. As we walked into the bar area, there happened to be a table around which six or eight women from Anne’s hometown of Berlin, Connecticut, were seated. We stopped to chitchat.
As Anne was talking with her friends, one of them asked me, “Where did you grow up?”
I said, “I didn’t.”
When that lead balloon dropped, it darn-near fractured my foot. I was tempted to ask the woman if she or any of her relatives had ever hawked bagels at Westfarms. But as Archie Bunker would say, I stifled myself.
It’s Complicated
In doing some research for this post, I discovered the Humor Styles Questionnaire, developed by psychologist Rod A. Martin and some colleagues in 2003. It identifies four main humor styles based on whether humor is adaptive (positive, constructive) or maladaptive (negative, potentially harmful), and whether it’s self-focused or other-focused. It breaks the styles down like this:
When I completed the questionnaire, it told me not to quit my day job.
Aside from making it evident humor is subjective, the questionnaire indicates how complicated the telling of even a simple joke can be. Depending on things like psychology, physiology, biology, culture, heritability, personal experiences, settings, circumstances, moods, and the wiring of one’s brain, one man’s joke can be another man’s trigger.
In keeping with some things that were expressed about social media’s capacity to inflame and trigger — especially if we’re wont or eager to be triggered — on the Friendship Bench on November 6th, social media can be a minefield when it comes to humor. A joke or an offhand remark used to be like a fart in a hurricane. Now it’s a stomp on an M14, exploding in outraged shares on every social media platform.
Given how hard it is to define, let alone achieve success, I sometimes think we should contend our objective as human beings is to make things complicated. With little more than humor for evidence, it’s clear we’re managing to complicate everything.
Humor is no joke.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
