What's So Damn Funny?

By Kevin Gibson
March 30, 2008

 I was on the elevator last week on my way up to the office where I work, and it struck me once again: I’m weird.

Yeah, I just feel different than the rest of the world for some reason. The elevator was crowded with women (mostly nursing students from the third floor) who were making idle chit chat about the weather, reality television and exotic cheeses, and I fought the urge all the way up to interject some off-the-wall comment just to see their reactions.

Something like, “Man, that Ted Bundy sure was a prolific serial killer.” Then a shake of the head, followed by swatting an invisible bug.

I’m not the only one who gets these urges, am I?

I was having dinner with my friend Ben recently, and he brought up something similar. You see, Ben is one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met, but he runs into the same kind of societal disconnection at times that I do.

He told me that one of his co-workers brings his dog to work a lot, and it was pointed out that when the dog sits down, he rests on his haunches so that his butt doesn’t quite touch the floor. Knowing that the dog recently had been neutered, Ben pointed at the dog’s nether region and said, “I bet it’s phantom limb syndrome!”

See, I thought it was hysterically funny, but he said his co-workers just gave him a strange look and went back to working.

Ben also told me he had an idea for making telephone conversations more interesting. (Like me, he isn’t a fan of talking on the phone.) He decided that instead of ending every conversation with “Goodbye,” he would end it with a cliffhanger.

As in, “OK, well, call me tomorrow and we’ll decide where to meet. OH MY GOD, THAT CAR IS SWERVING RIGHT TOWARD ME!! AUUUUGHH!!” Click.

That way, he said, until the next phone conversation, the other person will be left with suspense like in an old-fashioned serial play. “Did Ben make it? Or was he smashed to bits by the oncoming car? Find out next time!”

I believe he said he tried it on his mom first. “It didn’t go over well,” he said.

I also have friends with whom I laugh at things that no one else in eleventeen thousand years would ever find funny. It’s great for us, but to the rest of the world we look like idiots.

Mention the word “penguin” around my friend Kirk and me, and we will fall all over each other. We’ve explained our inside joke to others, and very few have found it even remotely amusing.

Bring up a slide rule or dental records when I’m sitting next to my friend Rob, and I guarantee we’ll lose it. But no one else gets it.

Offer my friend Kory a warm hot dog and see what happens. (OK, maybe you shouldn’t.)

And all you have to do to crack up my buddy Greg and me is to say, “That’s what she said.” I mean, you could say that after any sentence, and we would find it funny, because we’ve been replaying the same tired joke literally for 25 years.

You get the picture – funny is in the ear of the beholder; there is no standard for laughter. What I find hilarious you might consider droll.

But then, I’m the kind of guy who laughs when he’s in pain. I’m also the kind of guy who would, after leaving the zoo, run at top speed into the parking lot screaming, “Run for your lives! They’re loose!!”

It is additionally true that I’m the kind who would OH MY GOD, THAT CAR IS SWERVING RIGHT TOWARD ME!! AUUUUGHH!!

E-mail me at kgramone@aol.com. Then duck.