LoC #4: Always Laugh at Your Own Jokes

This is another 'Law of Comedy' that I remembered last night, and probably stems from telling WAY too many jokes that no-one else finds particularly funny. I remember thinking, back in The Day, 'Well, if nobody else is going to laugh, I'm going to!' And it seemed a pretty good motto to adopt (even if was self-serving), especially if, like me, after making with the funny you prefer the sound of laughing to that of tumbleweeds. Let's not forget all of those timeless adages about being able to laugh at yourself, and at life. It got me thinking of some of the laughable things I've done, and how true it is that if I wasn't able to laugh about these episodes in my life, I would surely be crying about them…

Believe it or not, I was a precocious little boy. My mother had taught me to know my own mind and to express it with as much dignity and courtesy as possible. Even at the tender age of 6, I knew what I liked and to what extent I was willing to tolerate persuasion to the contrary. When I was that age, my parents decided that we needed to make a long road trip to see my great-grandmother in Michigan. She was an old woman, and they thought it would be a good idea for my brother and me to meet her before she passed away. So we made the trip up from Tallahassee to Lansing, eager to bridge the generation gap and instil at least one or two good memories to be passed on. My great-grandma had other ideas… Great Grandma had a well-known and powerful motus operandi when it came to getting people to do things. In her attempts to entice someone to do something they'd otherwise prefer not to, Great Grandma employed one of the most powerful weapons of all: guilt. Now, guilt can be used with skill by lots of people in lots of situations, but no-one handles it like a grand-parent. After several failed attempts at asking anyone to do anything, Great Grandma would go right for the jugular: 'If you love me, you'll _____'. This worked on everyone, and she knew it. We all knew she'd do it, and we all knew that we'd succumb, eventually, to that ultimatum. Except for me, of course, and except  for when it came to broccoli. I did NOT like broccoli, and I knew that I did not like broccoli. When Great Grandma asked me to eat it the first time, I politely refused: 'No, thank you. I don't like broccoli'. On the second time of asking, I repeated my rejection: 'No. thank you. I don't like broccoli'. Great Grandma knew she'd have to bring out the big guns. 'If you love me, you'll eat your broccoli'. Exasperated beyond manners and much to my mother's humiliation, I responded with a frank, 'Why don't you just bug off, lady?'. We left the next day, and that was near enough the last thing I said to her.

When I was in the fifth grade, having JUST moved to the Pacific Northwest from a suburb of Memphis, TN, I decided that my slow, Southern drawl wasn't quite enough to make me stand out. (It was enough for them to put me into remedial reading, classes, though – it took me a while to convince them that not everyone who SOUNDS like Gomer Pyle thinks like him, too.) No, being tall, skinny and completely bumpkin-afied wasn't enough. After watching some promotional church video, I decided that what I really wanted to do to set myself apart was to wear an 'I'm a Mormon' t-shirt. So I had not one, but two printed up on blank baseball shirts and wore them with SO much pride (and joyful ignorance) that I was able to ignore the 'You're a what..? A moron?' comments and was big enough that no one dared to try to beat me up. It was probably an added bonus that my friends at the time were the AD&D-playing, pale-skinned nerds of the school – so my venture into uber-nerdom meant that even they had someone to snigger at. 

My very first day of high school (having JUST gotten over the whole 'I'm a Mormon' fiasco), I was still doing my best to isolate myself from the cool crowd. In an unprecedented display of adolescent chivalry (and a blatant play for my best friend's older sister), I went to open the door for two hot babes (they were Juniors, for Christ's sake!). With my sparkling green eyes and butter-wouldn't-melt-in-these-dimples smile, I gallantly pushed one-half of the double glass doors and oozed a sweet 'After you, ladies.' They went through, saying something incredibly complimentary, I'm sure (although you'd be forgiven if it sounded like just laughter to you), and I began to follow. Unfortunately, being so very new to the school (and, apparently, to concept of double doors), I failed to realise that between the two double doors as a very hard, and very immobile steel post. You see, the other door of the double was already open and I just assumed that what was left for me was the whole expanse of the doorway. A large 'thud' and me ending up on my ass heralded to a large crowd that I was very much mistaken.

There are lots of 'you have to laugh' episodes in my life involving Speedos – not the least of which is admitting that there are lots of episodes in my life involving Speedos, full-stop. However, one particular incident in college stands out as a time when I really wish I'd thought a bit more about how what I say gets heard (as opposed to how it sounded in my head). I used to swim quite a bit, despite being absolutely horrible at it. And, being me, I wanted to make sure that I had the right equipment for the activity… so, in a quiet little town in West Wales, on my way to the local swimming baths, I bought my first pair of Speedos. A catching hunter-green number, with white accents, I marvelled at how it could be acceptable to wear so little in public. But I trusted the salesperson that this was, indeed, my size and proceeded to adorn them before jumping in the pool. In the group changing room, and in a last moment of self-doubt, I turned to the gentleman next to me, looked down at my banana-hammock and asked, quite innocently, 'Does this look right to you?' It was only after I saw his look of horror that I realised how what I said might be misconstrued. Needless to say we both showered, swam and left the pool without making eye contact again.

The last one I'll share for now is something I've only just been told about, even though it happened over 20 years ago. Now, I was a decent athlete in high school… nothing spectacular, but nothing shameful, either. I mean, there are plenty of 'laugh-at-myself' sporting moments: farting on the takeoff of the long-jump, going sideways and landing into the other pole vault competitors, admitting to the whole team that I scored my first ever touchdown with my eyes closed. I was an OK athlete, but I never thought that I would be remembered for it. So when, upon re-connecting with a long lost friend via Facebook a few months ago, I was surprised to read her ask after two decades of non-contact, whether I still had my track sweats from High School. When I replied that I didn't and why would she ask, she commented that those sweats had been legendary in our three years on the same squad. Our track sweats were anything but legendary: they were bright gold, baggy and this was the 80s, so we pushed the legs up to our knees. There must have been something else about those sweats that made them memorable to her. Turns out, that something else was my something else. Unknown to me, I had spent three years on the track team being the unwitting subject of many a locker-room banter regarding the bulge in my sweats. Clearly, I'm not now making my living as a porn star, so I can't claim to be overly well endowed, but I was a big fan of boxer shorts - and those sweats, God bless them, must have hung in all the wrong places. To add insult to injury, the story now is that EVERYONE knew about it… everyone but me. I really wish I'd known that before doing that oiled-up synchronised body-building routine in nothing but cycling shorts my senior year…


And this only just scratches the surface. I haven't touched on the romantic, or sexual, or just-plain-stupid mistakes I've made – and believe me when I say that there are plenty of all three of those. But the point is (and I don't blame you for asking) that we have always done, and will continue to do things that are so cringe-worthy that we will be faced with a choice. We can either decide that those moments are too much to bear and cower in the shame of our indiscretion or our badly-placed foot, or we can elect to adopt a sense of perspective about who we are, and whether that faux pas really has the legs to worry about long-term. If we opt to recognise the beauty of our own fallibility, those moments that were so horrendously uncomfortable become something else, something worthwhile. Choose to laugh at yourself, and those moments become side-splittingly, spit-your-water-out, laugh-'til-you-cry funny. At those moments in our lives, despite how humiliating they must seem at the time, we all would do well to remember that the world is a very big place indeed. Don't' sweat the small stuff, and try to remember that 'You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing.' Stay young: laugh at yourself as much as possible.