Funnier Than You Think, or Not So Funny as You Think

When someone tells you in so many words, "That's not funny," you're willing to let the matter drop right there,but not because you agree with the assessment. In all probability, you still think the pre-judged not funny matter is funny, but such is the nature of humor, you can't arrive at funny by logic.

A thing is either funny or not, will cause the most miserable person a smile and a chuckle before the need arises to return to the misery. Having great stockpiles of money or commodities is not a passport to a sense of awareness of humor. Quite often, the poor are able to see irony in places we'd suspect them of being too busy with their miserable life to recognize.

When someone tells you in so many words, about some coincidence, "That's funny," you let the matter drop because, once again, you don't agree with the assessment. This time you believe the description is about the potential for irony to be confused with something laughable.

Humor has a compelling hold on you and, you suspect, has a grip on most everyone with whom you come in contact, hear about in the various media, and encounter in random, often artificial contacts. Some of your earliest memories of this compelling hold take you to times and places where you were under the guidance or supervision of an older person who set great value on seriousness. 

You either had a prescient gift for spotting and identifying such serious individuals, or you must face the fact of young persons being constitutionally able to spot such gravitas-bearing individuals. In a humorous enough sense, young persons often have fine-tuned radar for identifying which older persons they can respect and which they know instinctively how to tease to great effect.

By serious adults, you mean those who by word, deed, and gesture, are unable to be anything but serious. To such individuals, seriousness is their profession. If it were possible to achieve an advanced degree in seriousness, they would have enrolled. They may be aware on some level of mirth and laughter, but only as persons who were practicing vegans are aware of meat eaters. 

Your approach to this vision of serious and funny adults leaves you with the unspoken confession that you never outgrew your sense that life, its events, and denizens are funny, and that serious individuals, persons seeking to acquire gravitas, are themselves causes of great humor.

In your universe, the choice cuts of humor often have an edge of sorrow nearby, in metaphor a choice cut of steak being larded with fat, thus a functional and symbiotic effect. The things you most enjoy laughing at or about remind you of some essential flaw in your presentation of Self to the outer world.

Ever since you began to realize you are a prime target for occasions of humor, your life has begun to pick up and the life about you has begun to seem funnier. This one step has allowed you to hold your anger at the things you can neither contain nor control at some sense of distance, allowing you to see how things you are unable to control can still be laughed at to great levels of relief and enjoyment.

If there were not so many serious intentions turning into humorous outcomes, we'd be overwhelmed by the bumps and cuts inflicted on us by the grief, loss, and bewilderment. If a thing is adjudicated as being not funny by an individual of street-cred gravitas, your reflexive response is to ask if there is a statute of limitations.