I’m Literally Too Funny
I don’t know if you guys knew this, but I’m dang funny.
I’m not kidding around here. Well, actually, I sort of am. But really, I’m hilarious.
I mean it.
In fact, I’ve been told that I’m too funny. I tell too many jokes. People don’t appreciate that. I totally get it, too. It hurts to laugh too much, plus you start to cry and you blow snot all over yourself.
In Heinlein’s book “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the story of the human Michael Smith who was born and raised on Mars and brought back to earth to learn how to behave like a human, one of the hardest things for him to learn was to have a sense of humor. As the book goes, Martians had no concept of humor and the humans had a hard time teaching Michael about humor and why people laugh.
Initially Michael was told that people laugh when something is funny, which means it is something happy or something that makes him happy. Yet Michael knew that people also felt happiness through love, and friendship, and achievement, and yet those sorts of things didn’t make people laugh. It wasn’t until some time later that Michael came to the realization that things are funny not because they are happy, but because they are painful. People laugh to deal with the pain, the irony, the frustration, the sadness. Not because they are happy.
Jerry Seinfeld says, “What’s the deal with airline food?” We laugh because we are thinking, “Yeah, no kidding. Airline food is lame!” Brian Regan says, “I before E, except after C, and when sounding like ‘A’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’, and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May, and you’ll always be wrong no matter what you say!” We laugh because we think, “For sure. I can never figure out how that rule is supposed to work!” I say, “People hate to laugh because they blow snot all over themselves.” You laugh because you think, “I know, that is so embarrassing, and now I have to wash these clothes.”
We don’t laugh at jokes about airline food because we love it so much. We laugh because it is so annoying. Michael Smith (or Heinlein, technically) was right — we laugh because it hurts, not because it is happy.
This is why I’m finding it odd that some people don’t like me making such funny jokes because my humor is too cynical and sarcastic. According to Heinlein, it wouldn’t be so darn funny if it wasn’t a little painful. And we know that Heinlein could not be wrong. After all, he wrote Starship Troopers, which was a great story before Paul Verhoeven ruined it.
In other words, it isn’t the cynicism or sarcasm that is inappropriate. It is the humor that is inappropriate. It’s like I’m trying to tell you, I’m literally too funny. I can’t help myself. I start out trying to have a serious blog post and the next thing you know you are scrubbing snot off your monitor.
Sorry.
