I have been blessed with a terrific sense of humor. I only know this because even after years of classic mishaps, boneheaded misadventures and downright disasters, I can still laugh about it all.
I have never really been sure where this sense of humor came from. I don’t remember being innately funny as a child. Sure, I said some funny things, such as asking my dad which kind of salt I would turn into if I turned around in church: Morton’s or Leslie’s.
But as far as being a wise guy, hardly. For the most part, I was a good natured enough young man. I can make this assumption because most of the family photos show me smiling and looking generally happy.
Thankfully, there was no camera around when I learned that my brother had died, for that was a huge turning point for me, not only in who I was to become, but in the way I look at life and handle its many trials and tribulations.
Humor has been the savior in this regard. Seeing the humor in a moment, regardless of how tragic or dire it may seem, helps me get to the other side. Without it, I would have been swallowed whole by life and probably never made it past my 30th year. I would have either been dead or institutionalized, the burden of daily life being too unbearable at times.
Wonderfully and somewhat unexpectedly, I found my funny bone. I have made something of a career out of being a humorist, an essayist, and now, a blogger.
The fact that I have such a humorous side surprises me. After all, I can be very intense at times. I didn’t get my nickname Hurricane by accident. I could become a Cat 5 of ominous woe and hurt, zeroing in on the core of someone’s ego and shredding it in mere moments in full public view.
It wasn’t until I saw Steven Colbert on CBS Sunday Morning that I began to figure it out. Steven was talking about his own years as a child, and part of that childhood was the tragic loss of his father and two brothers in an airliner crash. It was that loss that turned his comedy gene on, as he found it to be the only way to deal with the pain of that loss.
A light went on in my head as he was talking and it crystalized the point in time that I went from being a mild mannered dweeb to a pretty funny one. I found that all that funny stuff hid the sorrow I felt at the loss of my brother at 14 and my father when I was 23 (his birthday is today, poetically)
As any humorist or comedian will tell you, humor comes from the pain in life. It is the emotion that is 180 degrees from the pain you feel. When experiencing tragedy, comedy can be the great salve for the open wounds.
I so identified with everything he was saying in the interview. It was very cathartic, for I finally began to understand the path my own life has taken, one that was both tragic and pretty damned funny at the same time.
So, how did I learn to be funny? I was lucky to have grown up in a family of comedians, so I didn’t have to look far. My uncle Mark was hilarious, as was my uncle Jim. My father was pretty funny, too, always hamming it up, perhaps because his own pain, the horror he saw during World War II, was its source.
The love of wordplay certainly helped, as well as growing up pretty much alone, with not many people to play with. My own brain became the playground and that funny voice in my head, the one that is dictating this right now, became a constant companion.
As the years have flown by, I have also learned that life is damned funny. Everything about it, really. Even death, which none of us can ever escape and which surrounds us every day, can have a humorous side to it.
Yes, that’s why I posted photos of my cremated dog on National Dog Day, next to some glue and the note on Facebook that I had gotten a dog kit and was about to put it together.
Jasper would have thought it was funny. I miss that dog dearly and still well up at times when I let myself visit the loss. But none of that will bring him back, and wallowing in the sorrow won’t help me move on.
The humor, however, does let me move on, often in the most unexpected and healing ways. I thank God regularly for giving me this sense of humor, this wonderful love of wordplay, and a great sense of timing, which I really don’t think can be taught – it’s something you’re born with.
I can also thank my brothers, who gave me a huge vocabulary, largely because I would sit down every day and pour through the World Book Dictionary, one day volume A-L, the next, M-Z, just so I could call them names that they had never heard before. Plus, it made an ordinary bodily function feel a bit more productive, at least until my legs fell asleep from the weight of the dictionaries.
I used to worry that I would lose this sense of humor over the years, that I would come to find life to be a very serious matter, as some people do.
Sorry, didn’t happen. Life is just a series of events, some gloriously grand; others downright miserable. All of them, though, can be very funny, if you just look at the absurdity of the whole thing. By whole thing, I mean life in general, not the situation you’re in at the moment. As they say, this too shall pass, and before you know it, you’re on the backside of something you were certain at the time was the worst thing that ever happened to you. With any luck, you find the humor in it, and you, along with your friends and family, can all have a good chuckle about it all for years to come.
In the Emerald City, laughing all the way,
– Robb