Humor

I am eligible to work in the United States but these days it's not enough just to check the box on the application. So, today I had to bring both my passport and driver's license in to work to be photocopied. Given my pale Irish skin, blue eyes, and Italian last name I thought it funny to crack jokes with the woman from HR about how I'd really just made my way across the porous Southern U.S. border on my first day. She doesn't have my sense of humor so she didn't think I was so funny. I found it very amusing to say, "I am not an illegal" but she was grim faced. So, since she was not amused by me previously I just gave her my stuff today.

It got me thinking though, I'm sure the woman from HR has a sense of humor, after all, everyone does. It's just that not everyone has the same sense of humor. How sad it is that not everyone can find all of the things I find funny amusing. Because I find A LOT of things funny! I wonder how people with different senses of humor get by because laughing at life and everything in it is how I get through the day. I relish finding something else that makes me laugh and crack myself up thinking of something that made laugh earlier. I am THAT person. The one that can always see the humor in any situation.

For instance, I love satire, especially Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I recently purchased Stephen Colbert's "I Am America (And So Can You)" on audiobook. I highly recommend the audiobook because you will laugh out loud! Well, you will if you have a sense of humor similar to mine. There are parts in it that made me howl with laughter as I was driving down the road and I've found it funny enough to listen to more than once. But not everyone loves satire. For instance, BET, Black Entertainment Television, came out with a satirical cartoon (do not click link at work or in public) about reading and it caused an uproar. I found it just as funny as I found Stephen Colbert calling Americans of child-bearing age that choose to remain single because they saw their parents divorce and are afraid of going through the same thing "a drain on society." The man mocked my fear of commitment, and reasoning behind it, and called me a drain on society and I laughed. And I laughed because it was funny and it was funny because it was mostly true.

I guess humor is one of the more perplexing aspects of human personality. What makes something funny to one person and not to another? And why is it that some people are able to laugh at themselves easily and others are not?