A few people get some parts of my humor. Some of the people I work with, well, I’ve worked with them for so long they have developed defense mechanisms to my jokes. I am not sure if they ever actually think I am funny, or if they’ve just come to realize when I am trying to be funny, so respond the least impolitely they can. Some of my close friends (both of them) can sometimes get the jokes, and can sometimes even appreciate them, but I am pretty sure they think I am usually being more cruel than funny. Readers of my sites are a strange bunch. I get feedback about how I was really really really a knockout, but then they go on to explain why, and I don’t understand why they think I was funny. At poetry slams I tend to do a bit of standup between poems, and people laugh, but in this case I am pretty sure it’s at me, not with me, but often I am so drunk I am not sure which way it should be. My mother got my sense of humor (or lack of). I can still remember many long car rides where I would make a silly snide comment, only to hear my dad ask, “Was that supposed to be funny?” Then my mother would explain why, yes, it was indeed not only supposed to be, but actually was funny. And her explanations were always spot on. Sadly my dad would usually follow this up with, “I get THAT, but still don’t get why it’s funny.” This almost always made my mother and me laugh even harder. And it wasn’t like my jokes were ever that great, it was that my dad seldom, if ever, got them. I usually knew this was going to be the reaction going in.

I like the obscure, esoteric, intellectual, literary, dry and ironic, and usually a bit mean humor. Think “Farside” if it had been done by Dennis Miller before he quit drinking and became a right-wing shill. This would make me an evil bad person, except I don’t hold myself above this fray! I aim that humor at myself more often than any other target. And this is where I lose the one person who gets me more often than any other. My girlfriend just doesn’t get self-deprecating humor. She gets upset when I make fun of myself. I tell her, “Always go for the joke,” but she just gets sad, which makes me sad, since making her sad is never my intention. Any humor takes effort. To have her probably, most likely, even understand the joke (she’s pretty sharp), but not understand why I have this need to attack, well, that makes me sad as well.

I know why she gets upset. She loves me. She doesn’t like to see anyone be mean to me (even me, myself, or I), or beat up on me, and she knows too often I don’t deserve it, but then neither do the other targets of my humor. I figure though, if you can’t go through life with a sense of humor, even a dark and twisted one like mine, if you can’t feel free to laugh at others and yourself, well then you’re doomed to take life too seriously. And no, I don’t think she takes life too seriously (though she’d probably disagree), I just know when I am on my death bed, 80 some years from now, I’ll be cracking a joke about how I got there and who’s turn it is to change my bedpan (Not it!).