Losing My Sense of Humor: A Rant Followed by a Book Recommendation

I am becoming a humorless crank.

I have long maintained that my ability to find humor in things, be they sleepless nights with infants or toothpick's lodged in my husband's foot (or both), is perhaps my greatest talent.

Which means that for a lot of the summer (and it is still summer in my mind, and I've been mulling this post since late July) I have been both humorless and talentless.

But there has been so much this summer that is not funny.

It is not funny when the opening night skit of vacation Bible school features two college-aged women being completely useless on a rainforest expedition (one reading a fashion magazine and one shrieking at imagined snakes) and the narrator repeating, three times, versions of the line, "Aren't we glad we got out of there [time travelling was involved] before the professor started his boring lecture about plants again."  I'm sure if I brought it up with the youth director, he would have pointed out that one of the men in the skit was also useless and it was all in good fun . . . and he would have probably been thinking that I just supported the idea that botany professors were boring pedants.  But every kid there saw young women only being useless and heard, three times, joking or not, that learning about plants is boring and listening to professors is something to be avoided.

(Oh, speaking of not funny and church things-- do not, in my presence, sing any song with a repeated verse then motions of "thumbs up, elbows out, knees together, feet out, butt out, tongue out, head up.  Hopefully you will also stop the spread of singing like this in any situation, whether or not I am there.  I know the point behind these silly church songs is not, "Let's make fun of the way that people with cerebral palsy move,"  BUT, wait, let's look.  We just put kids into the classic "elbow flag" and possibly drooling stance of someone with cerebral palsy and now we are going to encourage them to laugh at each other because . .  people in this stance should be laughed at?  it is hilarious that some people can't control their limbs?
Oh, but it is not about my son?  You weren't making fun of the way he walks?  He looks normal when he walks anyway?
So you want kids to be able to learn that physical differences are mockable when nobody they know is being made fun of?
Or perhaps I am just being overly sensitive and nobody associates that posture and spastic movements with anything negative?  Umm. Well.  Uh, there is enough not funny in politics without me further going there.)

And lots of the not funny lasted all summer.

I cringed, (and did sorta laugh, I'll admit), when I was heard claimed that Hillary Clinton is responsible for her husband's actions while Donald Trump needs to be forgiven for his womanizing past because all Christians have sinned and we are not to judge.

I smiled about the coverage of the Democratic convention when, "the candidate's spouse looked fetching in a blue pantsuit, but doesn't have the upper arms of the current first lady," until I noticed how concerned I was about his health and what that might do for her presidency.  I never considered the health of Barbara, Hillary, Liddy, Laura, Tipper, Theresa, Cindy, Michelle, Ann, or Melania as part of their husband's candidacy, and hate having a double standard.

I laughed a lot at Ghostbusters, but found the surrounding hoop-la remarkably unfunny.

My whole family watched a great deal of the Olympics, so I could kind of laugh at headlines like, "Phelps Ties for Silver Ledecky sets new world record" and mutter my thanks to Andy Murray for alerting his interviewer that he is not the first person to win more than one Olympic tennis gold, ["I think Venus and Serena have won about four each."]

I cheered for the Mister when he corrected one of Aster's doctors when the doctor suggested (humorously??) that the Mister probably thought the doctor was r-word.  I cheered for my mother-in-law when she asked if there were any good looking boys in Dianthus's class, after he had been asked if there were any good looking girls, but couldn't help myself and went ahead and asked if there were any interesting intelligent classmates.

I guess I really thought that I was one of the feminists who could laugh at feminism. And maybe I still am. Except, it turns out, I am one of those feminists who not only upholds the radical notion that women are people, but also that they should be treated like, and spoken about, as if they are people.  I'm one of those radical educators (and dare I say Christians) who thinks that both words and actions matter. And there has a lot for me to be cranky about.

Strangely, I was in one of these there-is-nothing-funny-about-this moods when I opened, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexi, which starts out with a kid being born with excess fluid on the brain.  Oh, the hilarity of hydrocephalus. And there's nothing funny about reservation schools or alcoholics or poverty or abandoning one's people in order to pursue hope or or racism or funeral after funeral on the rez.  Yet somehow there is, because coupled with Ellen Forney's drawings, Alexi's words are funny.  Very funny.  And the situation is so NOT FUNNY.  And it is true and sad and really uncomfortable to be laughing at. Like lots of life.  Reading it helped me regain my talent*.

I hope you are surrounded by things that are joyously funny, like Dianthus and Aster claiming to swim like Le Ducky, but if you only have a enough to offer a little smirk, I hope you take that smirk and cherish it, for an interesting fate awaits you.

"Reader you must know that an interesting fate (sometimes involving rats, sometimes not) awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform,"
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo pg. 25

*But I'm still somewhat humorless and cranky, so I wouldn't test it.