Published: March 12, 2009 09:31 pm      

Lively sense of humor

Things never get so bad that you can’t laugh about them.

No, that’s a lie.

Sometimes things can get worse than laughable. There’s a lot of that in the world, and I don’t mean to ignore it.

But the truth is that so many of the things we take so seriously — well, they’re pretty serious, folks.

Oops, sorry. What I meant to say was — some of them do have their funny side. That’s not including the junk that so many people like to laugh at these days, like trash and noise.

The things I think are funny are the things that come from being, well, people.

Take this snippet from the Washington Post recently, in regard to the American Government’s stubborn insistence some years ago that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Apparently (and this is reported as having actually happened) after reading about this for some time, Saddam Hussein turned to his advisers and said, “Is there something you’re not telling me about our weapons program?”

I think that’s funny.

And here’s something else I picked up from the paper recently: it seems that scientists have discovered that, when financial traders have elevated levels of testosterone they make more profits — but they also engage in much riskier behavior. Considering the state of the market these days, a researcher concluded, “If you had more women on the trading floors, you would probably eliminate some of this instability.”

Now that’s amusing. Not that I expect the big bosses to change their habits accordingly. I doubt that the New York Stock Exchange will change its dicor to pink in the near future — but it’s a thought.

Then there’s the commercial for HD TV, which bills itself right up there on the screen as “intelligent TV” and then uses the slogan “Like never before.” Well, TV honchos, you might be interested to learn that your intelligent TV ad carries a serious grammatical error in its message. (It should be “As never before.”) That’s on the same level as Wal-Mart’s “How may we help you?” which of course should be “How can we help you?” You’d think these folks would at least consult their high school English teacher before they commit themselves to print.

And you just have to laugh at the octuplets mom, and her serene faith that the first person she should hire after the birth is a — publicist.

Don’t tell them I said this, but I think the eternal quest of every young person since the 1960s, “to find myself,” is rather entertaining. Seems to me young folks should be debating “what I want to become,” instead of looking all over the world for “who I am” already! And I also think we old folks and our conviction that we know it all (who, me?) is also comic, though true, of course.

I think it’s amusing that during the ads for new kinds of mops, I feel really sorry for the old dejected ones trying to get back into the house. And, it’s not a big thing, but I find it delightful that a relative of mine once, after leaving a long message on a friend’s answering machine, signed off unthinkingly with “Amen.”

Then there are certain religious nuts. I won’t mention any modern contenders for this honor, because your idea of that term might not agree with my idea, but there have been and still are, some we might agree on if we tried. Surely the folks would qualify who sold all their possessions one month in the 1800s and climbed trees, to be first up for the Second Coming, predicted for that morning by their leader, ( He revised his calendar several times which made for a lot of tree-climbing.)

And there are their opposites, the folks who are dedicated to tearing out all evidences of religion all over the world. Just like everybody else on a soapbox, or on a TV rant, these folks are amusing, even a little endearing, as they keep making their tired-out, age-old arguments against religion, as if they were the very first to ever think of such things. They remind me of little boys putting up their dukes and challenging those stupid adults who never get anything right. It makes you want to smile fondly, pat them on the head and, for the sake of their own dignity, pretend they have original arguments and novel insights that believers never thought of before. (Not that they don’t have some points well worth thinking about — and sometimes refuting.)

My pastor has a wonderful sense of humor. I’ve tried to get him to write out my funeral sermon and let me read it now, so I can have a good laugh like everyone else at the service, but so far, no luck. Jesus was a story-teller, and he had a great sense of humor too — it’s just that such things seem frivolous to some religious-minded folks so you don’t hear much about it. Books have been written about this: his comparison of rich people to camels trying to go through the eye of a needle (possibly a gate in Jerusalem); his story about the beam and the speck in the eye; his slightly sarcastic definition of family, his exchange with the woman about the crumbs from the table of the chosen, and many other examples.

Things other people find disturbing often (not always) seem to me to be, well, comical. It can be a burden, having a sense of humor, mostly because it’s not easy in some cases to preempt anger. If you’re a Democrat, the Republicans are not funny, and if you’re a Republican, Democrats are not funny, and if you’re an Independent — well, maybe that’s why I think it helps to find us all funny in some ways.

Because to be human is to be funny.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears in the Times-News on alternate Sundays.