Absence of Humor
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... "It's nice to be a grown up- now I can say loud and proud: "I'm not a nerd; I'm an intellectual."
I have a friend, two days away, who reads a lot. About once a year I drive down through the mountains and see him. We go on a pacific ocean ferry and then we stay a night or two on "the island." We never get bored and we never shut up. Yet we never tell a single joke or make a single wisecrack. You might say he has a nice dry sense of humor... while I have an absence of humor. We have a great time.
In my prairie city is lady who isn't as bookish. She often remarks how she values laughter. With her the chocks come off my wheels, I naturally shift to the humor gear, and- Wheee! We laugh and laugh. May I share? May I self disclose? Between the ocean side of me and the prairie side... Perhaps my default state is the "absence of humor" one.
That roar of laughter you now hear is from local disbelieving readers who know me as "off the wall-" At my toastmaster club if we need the "joke of the day" slot to be filled then heads automatically turn towards me.
(Joke)
The people I know in town are regular folks while most of my internet readers- since this is an essay site- will tend to be computer guys. Yes, I am aware that recently folks such as housewives, who don't know a bit from byte, have been learning which keys to press on a keyboard and then going on to keep cyber journals and (we)b logs. Nevertheless every site for essays that I have found so far has been by tech-savy people writing about computers or computer age business. Except for my own site, that is.
When I say "computer guy" I hear echoes of computer geek, nerd or Star Wars fan. I don't mean that as a "put down." How could I? Every year I myself attend the local sci-fi and fantasy convention. Recently I sat on a panel, at the front of a big convention room, for a discussion of the works of writer Robert Heinlein.
Several people in the audience had just commented on his novel, Job: a Comedy of Errors, about a newly married couple. The narrator is the husband who comes to believe they are being toyed with as in the biblical title reference. I commented, "There is a hidden little paragraph, blink and you'll miss it, where the husband says something like: 'I love my wife dearly, but she has one sad flaw: she has absolutely no sense of humor.'" I added, "Giving hope to nerds everywhere!" There was a married couple sitting near the front and, as everyone laughed, I saw their heads snap inwards to make eye contact with each other. My heart went out to them. The wife, I knew, was like the wife in the book, always solemn; the husband often had a tiny smile and amused eyes. I am so glad they found each other.
(Jest)
Another Heinlein novel, The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, has a brief scene of a narrator visiting another dimension where he meets a dark hero, a hero who keeps battling a villain, the Galactic Overlord, a villain who keeps escaping justice. This hero, who was clearly from our own dimension's radio serials and Sunday colored comics, never smiled. His work was too important, too serious. And besides, back in our dimension, he had been drawn as a not-very-rounded character.
Perhaps, then, someone like me who came of age reading serials or nurse stories or The Hardy Boys would be "comedy challenged." Don't blame the writers: It is very hard to write spoken humor into your prose. I know, I've tried! Louis L'Amour's attempts at putting humorous speech into his westerns pretty much begins and ends with his nearly-first novel Radigan.
I can picture a modern boy with a chemistry set and a computer. Maybe, if he reads too many serials, then he could have an absence of humor. But then again modern nonprose serials, such as Star Wars, have their light moments. And the new stuff out of Japan has something unknown to Aristotle: dramedy.
I think it is not reading but harsh life itself that shuts the door to humor. I remember a scene in a book I read in elementary school: A frontier schoolteacher is looking down on a brother and sister. Their faces are always so expressionless. The teacher's heart goes out to them as she realizes that on their homestead they are trying too hard, stretched too thin, to have any life. Perhaps that scene stuck with me because of the face in my mirror.
(Jape)
Years later, in college,I remembered that scene. I was taking a class where some of us sat around a long back table. One of my classmates was an uber serious older lady who reminded me of Eva Braun down in the Hitler bunker. One day she was absent. The other students needed to unload: "She is so serious." "She never Laughs." "Never smiles." I was sitting quietly as I made a silent Note to self: Next time someone jokes just look straight down at the table, for you never laugh either! ...At least I smile.
On my next trip back to the farm I dusted off the TV and tried watching situation comedies, trying to see if I could catch up on whatever it was I had mysteriously been missing. But finding the X factor wasn't that easy: It took time. As it happens, I have a memory like a filing cabinet. (my family hates me for it) Today I could easily write here a blow by blow description of my increasingly successful pursuit of humor, but no- I am too shy. Besides, everyone finds their own trail.
Right now as I sit at a simple donut shop scribbling with a stylus on some cheap papyrus, and staring off into space, I am aware that somewhere, in cyberspace and time, a computer guy is in a fancy Starbucks with a lap top, reading my typed version, and he too is staring off and wondering: "How can anyone go from an "absence of humor" to having some? Can I do so too?" Let me be clear: I know it is possible because I have done so. And if I don't stretch out my clown hand- strrrrretchhh -to help my fellow nerds then who will? Who?
(Joker)
I can tell you who won't: Star Trek the Next Generation. Now, I haven't seen a certain episode in years, and maybe I misjudged it at the time. Do you know the one where Mr. Data tries to learn to have humor? He spends an episode with real people and holodeck people and at the end of the hour... he has not learned anything. It is sad to think of a nerd viewer who wants to learn along with him, starting out with such hope, only to learn nothing. Somehow the lessons don't sink in or stick on. But as I said, I haven't seen that episode in years, so maybe I am being too harsh when I say the script writers failed to teach. ...Or perhaps they meant to show that humor is not something instantly taught but something to be caught, learned over time. How true.
I do believe that for another episode they failed to the point of being abusive. I learned about abuse in a writer's class after I submitted a fairy tale, a tale where a girl is abused by a wicked mother and then, of course, finds magical helpers. Our teacher sternly made it very clear: if you are going to show (on the page) abuse to a young reader, who may in fact be in a comparable situation herself, then you have to show her how to solve the problem. Magic doesn't count.
(Jester)
Therefore it pains me to imagine a bewildered person watching the episode where the landing party is standing around socializing in a governor's lounge. Mr. Data and the governor are in nerd heaven, smiling broadly, as they tell each other facts. Something like:
"And did you know, Sir, that the wind velocity of the sparrow is...
"Really! And did you know, Sir, that the average rainfall in the amazon basin is...
"Fascinating! And the favorite color of the..."
And while they are so happy the rest of the landing party is looking on and laughing at them for being "conversation challenged." Perhaps (I forget) they were being explicitly judgemental of Mr. Data and the governor for not making making "small talk." I was not amused. Surely there are new babies being born every year who do not understand small talk- yet who love facts and serious things. If a writer is going to criticize then he have a duty to teach. But this was not done, not in that episode.
If I were a teacher I would say, 'write this on your cuff: Small talk is a big hanger-door sized opening to humor.'
(Clown)
Professors would like to both say and hear long paragraphs of information... stand up comedians like their long routines... evangelical Christians would love to recite at length verses of their dear bible... But not at a party. At least, not during the first hour.
If you meet these people in a lounge then they will always make small talk at first, and they might not ever get beyond such talk during the evening. By small I mean as in a professor saying only a very small paragraph, of a sentence or two, at time... I mean a comedian telling only a small joke "how many light bulbs does it take..." so that others can tell a light bulb joke themselves... And while I am not too shy to drop the G-word I don't evangelize for longer than a sentence. "Maybe God wanted me to miss that bus."
Even Albert Einstein, at a party, or meeting me on the sidewalk, would encourage me to tell my own joke, and say my own short paragraph, while he, from politeness, would not be drawn into giving a long description of what heavy water is, not until later in the party. Small talk, unlike atomic reactor water, can't be heavy: if Albert asks after my health he expects to hear "fine!" ...And this is entirely appropriate. Small talk is a salve for the soul. It is like a nice hello, an acknowledgement that we are seen and heard... and that we matter. I "get" Canadian singer Amanda Marshal's song, Everybody's got a story that would break your heart. I don't know what your story is, but in this vale of tears if I can look in your eye, and say "Hello," then I have accomplished something for you and for me...
(Lark)
... I will never forget that poor American girl, Patty, in Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. As I see it, human encounters are rarely neutral. If not nurturing, then yes, it's abusive. Folks who easily get confused between the two contrasts might be best off if they just make a habbit, a default, of being nurturing. Patty, living in an abusive home, befriends a young nazi because he is nice to her. I was struck by Patty's inability to make small talk. I suppose this is partly because she is nervous with people. And partly because Patty is so intent on understanding the world, and from her being so serious about answering people. But there has to be another reason: after all, she thinks about things a lot. So surely, at one level, she is a "smart nerd" but, if so, then why isn't she smart enough to "get" small talk? Looking back, I think maybe Patty didn't realize she had something to offer. Maybe, with her low self esteem, it didn't occur to her that others would benefit from her small acknowledgement of them.
I hope that once Patty acquires a habit of thinking about others, with small-talk, she will be on the road to helping others, with humor.
An older German, during the war years, was in a nazi death camp. Survivor Victor Frankl tells of helping another man to hold on to life... by teaching him to have humor. He told his friend they each had to tell one funny thing per day. For example, "After you get out of here you will be at a supper party and you will plead with the host to "please-please-please ladle my soup from the bottom!..."" (where the vegetables are) This has three lessons for me.
One: Even in a death camp hell, or in poor Patty's heavy home, you can summon enough lightness of spirit to make a joke. (Joke: You ask me, How can I summon lightness of spirit? I reply, Don't ask me how: that is a mere "detail," -and I'm a "policy" man!)...The lev in the noun levity is like in the word levitation: it means light.
Two: Humor can be learned by role modeling, as in Victor modeling for his friend. I guess Patty, being a lone wolf, had no models. I've been fascinated by modeling ever since novelist John Gardner advised apprentice writers that people are like chimpanzees: they can't do much better than what they have seen others do. I suppose modeling might involve things like looking for the incongruous, memorizing specific things to repeat to others and, perhaps most important of all, learning (by experiencing and retaining) what the zen of a summoned "humor state" feels like. For me it is like having a thousand clowns inside. (A speechmaker advises telling three jokes in a row since for the first two jokes people may not know you are joking or may be slow to switch gears and summon their humor state, but by the third joke they are ready to laugh hard... which means: I am not the only one with an absense of humor making me slow to switch gears!)
Three: When you would be too serious to make any humor for yourself then you could still do so as a gift to another, as between Victor and his friend. If I might drop the G-word: God wants me to summon up some humor because then, acting through me, He is adding a little grace to this earth... And this, to me, is the X factor for humor. "Perfect love casteth out all fear," goes the Bible, and certainly as I focus on humor for others my inhibitions fade.... I think that if my focus was on getting attention for myself I would end up tossing lead balloons.
(Wit)
I may re-think that question of, 'what is my default state for humor?' Albert would shrug and say "Everything is relative." He might add, using a strange physics metaphor, "Sean, your "quantum humor wave" for the ocean is normal, and your "quantum humor wave" that manifests on the prairies is also normal." Then my scientist friend would switch to plain English to ask something important: "So, when are you going to introduce me to this laughing lady?"
Sean Crawford
First week of autumn,
2008... Wheee!
footnotes
~Laugh or cry? Blair tells me that down in the U.S. chemistry sets have been all but banned by the department of homeland security. This while the U.S. has gone from third place to seventeenth place, world wide, in the number of degrees in science and engineering. (see Wired magazine on-line) Soon the newest chips and software will be invented offshore. (Yes, I've read The World is Flat.)
~ I once had the privilege, in a hotel alcove, at a convention, of hearing sf writer and proud father David Gerrold reading out loud a passage where his narrator's adopted son learns, from Father and Grandmother, to have humor. I would refer humor scholars to that part of The Martian Child.
~In Heinlein's Have Space Suit- Will Travel the teenage hero's scientist father never tires of laughing over Three Men In A Boat- to say nothing of the dog. That 19th century book is a classic example of not depending on verbal cleverness nor puns nor being merely witty- it is true humor of the human condition. Another book for the scholars.
~Sf writer Connie Willis must have liked Heinlein and that book too. Her latest novel, of time travel to the Victorian age, is called To Say Nothing of the Dog. It is gently funny all through.
~I touch on humor in my essay, Nerds in Paradise.