I am not sure it's okay to laugh right now

Standing by...

Hi, welcome back! You might have noticed that I’m now giving myself more leeway in terms of titling these posts. I don’t like spicy, but even I need to zazz things up a little bit, you know?

The only other interesting side note I have to start this post off with is that I just looked down at my keyboard and discovered it has an emoji key. It’s a new computer—and keyboard. I HAD NO IDEA THIS TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGH EXISTED UNTIL JUST NOW! And you know I have to try it out. 🐦

AND gifs?!? This is a magical keyboard! Oh no, wait, I’m just old. LET’S GO

My dad once told me that he was perplexed because he didn’t seem to find humor in what most other people did. Movies or jokes that we all found hilarious did not strike his fancy. I tried to remind him that everyone’s sense of humor is different and that it was okay if he didn’t find these things funny, we liked him anyway. Not that he cared—at least on the outside, he didn’t seem to care a rat’s patootie about what people thought about him.

When he was in his mid-80s, he went on a quest to find things that were funny to him. Better late than never, right? A few months ago as I was getting ready to delete his Gmail address and Google Drive files, I came across a document from 2019 in which he had put jokes or one-liners he thought were funny. Here’s a sampling:

A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything.”

Two fish in a tank. The smaller asks, “Do you know how to drive this thing?”

Did you hear about the woman who drowned in a bowl of muesli? She was pulled under by a strong currant.

There were quite a few things on the list that were vulgar, and I don’t care how funny they would have been coming from, say, a friend of mine (most of them wouldn’t have been but I’m just saying), they are all sorts of wrong when they come from your dad, so I didn’t include any here because that would just be kind of oogie for me.

The Popster (because that’s what I called him—it seemed to fit better than “Dad” for me) definitely had his own brand of humor, and while he was in a different location on the spectrum than me, he was funny himself. Sometimes I don’t think he meant to be, but his delivery was so dry that it was often hilarious in an understated way. Other times I didn’t find him funny, but at least I got him, for better or worse. We were pretty good at communicating with each other. Now that he’s gone, I really appreciate that we had that, because I don’t have it with anyone else.

The Popster had a lot of big feelings. You just didn’t see them often, or you might catch them at times you wouldn’t expect. Like, something about the movie Cars made him cry. I don’t know what it was, and even if I watched it again to see if I could pick it out, I’m not sure I could. I know that Pixar puts a lot of big feels in their movies, but for an old guy to tear up at a cartoon car—that’s either a masterpiece of a movie, or an old guy who had some childhood issues to work out. Or maybe both…

I bring all this up as a way to frame my own story, I guess. He and I had a lot in common, something I didn’t realize until these last few years, and as I continue to understand who he was, it helps me understand who I am.

2019. He said that his EBC Brakes hat was his official “going out for coffee” hat.

As far as I can recall, however, Cars did not make me cry. I do remember laughing though? I love to laugh! And I love to make other people laugh. However sometimes this comes with a cost.

There have been at least three times in the last year where I can remember finding something funny—i.e. laughing at something—that was not in fact funny. Meaning, I should not have laughed, but I did. And it is embarrassing because I feel like an ass. Every time. And I’m sure I’ve been doing it my whole life.

As someone who doesn’t always understand social cues, I miss a lot of things. It’s hard for me to look directly at people to begin with, and even when I manage it, I don’t read facial expressions very well. But sometimes I’ll catch an expression that I take as light or humorous, or interpret a gesture or some verbal cue as funny … even though the context did not end up being funny.

Last year a friend was telling me about her hysterectomy. Something about her face caused me to giggle. FAIL.

I was on the phone with a friend who had some news, and she started out the sentence with something I interpreted as funny and I laughed, and then she finished the sentence by informing me that one of her dear friends had just passed away. NOPE.

And then something like this happens:

Person: It’s like when there’s a big car wreck in an ice storm and you watch about ten cars run into each other and go thoomp thoomp thoomp thoomp…

The thoomps are accompanied by hand motions and then I laugh because thoomps are funny

Me: hahahaha!

Person: …and then like ten people die.

WAY TO GO, ACE.

Was this funny? I don’t know. I don’t think the context was funny. Are high-fatality car wrecks occasions for laughter?

There’s probably some story material here somewhere. Maybe the main character reads context wrong and gets herself into some relatable hilarity. Maybe it would be funny in a book. In real life it’s just kind of exhausting.

A few nights back, we got together with another couple for game night, and played a game where you have to communicate certain ideas using only the handful of “magnetic poetry” words you grabbed from the pile. As I put my Ransom Notes (that’s the name of the game) together, I kept laughing at what I was creating. Words are effing funny! And I tend to crack myself up on a regular basis. Often Marcus just looks at me like I just [insert past tense of thing you shouldn’t do in front of other people here] when I laugh hysterically at my own joke, but we are in the privacy of our own home and he’s allowed to not have a sense of humor and not find me funny af.

So while we played this game, I was the only one who was laughing as I created my word masterpieces and for some reason, I kept apologizing for it. Like, “I’m sorry I’m over here laughing at something I find really funny even though you all seem to be normal enough to keep it together.” My default is to feel like I’m doing something wrong, even while playing a game. (Is wrong to laugh at your own jokes or not? If you have an opinion on this, leave a comment. When it’s all said and done, aka when we bite the big one, I think the only people we have to please in life are ourselves, but that doesn’t make game night any easier.)

I doubt my sense of humor will change. I am pretty sure that I’ll never get better at reading the room or laughing at things that aren’t supposed to be funny, and maybe I’ll always be the only one laughing at my own jokes. All I can hope for is that I stop caring quite so much about what other people think about my mistakes, and hope that I always manage to have friends and family around who are kind and patient and understanding and maybe don’t overthink things as much as I do.

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