I was listening to a song the other day, in which the singer muses about what advice he’d like to leave for his future grandchildren, after his death. I found this song amusing because I share two things in common with the song’s author. These would be the facts that we’re each unmarried and have no kids. So neither of us should be consumed with thoughts of our future offspring’s offspring, when we don’t even have offspring.
It may not make logical sense to think about what my future offspring will think about me, and what I would want to instill in them, since I’m not even seriously dating anyone, but all logic be damned, It’s my prerogative to think these thoughts, and I do!
I think part of the reason that I think so often about my future lineage is that I’m obsessed with the idea that I may be a mathematical byproduct of various genes mixing in various ovaries over time, and I’m curious to see the next evolution of my gene pool.
I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing my relatives and trying to piece together which pieces of my own jigsaw puzzle came from them, and for the most part, I’ve figured out a lot of it. I got music from my maternal grandmother, my memory from my maternal grandfather, and my impulsive need to doubt and worry about irrational fears from my paternal grandmother. The major problem that I have with my personal jigsaw puzzle is that I never got a chance to meet the puzzle piece that was my paternal grandfather, “Papa Sam,” who passed away a few years before I was born.
According to my cousins, who knew Sam well, he was one of the nicest and friendliest people around, the kind of guy who could tell a great story and make a room bust out in laughter. And according to his daughter in law, my Aunt, he wasn’t just funny; he was also witty, and politically opinionated. She told me once that he was notorious for ranting about how FDR had ruined America in a span of just 12 years, but she made sure to mention the fact that his rants weren’t considered obnoxious, because while he may have been confident in his opinions, they lacked an air of arrogance.
While the aforementioned descriptions of my grandfather sound wonderful, and I’d like to think that I’m considered similarly by my peers, I know for a fact that I often come across as arrogant when I express my political opinions, so this apple may have rolled a bit far from Papa Sam’s tree. But I’d like to think that for the most part, I’m considered a friendly guy with a decent arsenal of funny stories to tell whenever the dreaded seven seconds of silence fill a room, and so I like to think that while I never got to meet Sam, I was fortunate enough to inherit some of his lackadaisical good nature.
Your sense of humor is an amazing attribute that is hard to trace. For example, my favorite show on television, and it’s not even a close call for me – is Larry David’s HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I could write at least twenty-five columns about why that show is great, but instead, I’ll skip the kudos, and just write a book someday.
But I mention this show in particular because it is my favorite show, because it is the funniest show I’ve ever seen in my life, yet neither one of my parents, nor my brother find this show funny, and this elucidates what I see as the largest gap in personality that exists between myself and the three of them. I think the differences in our senses of humor are responsible for ninety percent of every argument we’ve ever had. The other ten percent is, of course, due to the fact that I am dead right, and they are dead wrong, but they refuse to admit this!
Most women, when surveyed about what is most important in a man they consider worthy of marriage will list a ‘sense of humor’ in the top three categories of importance. As a matter of fact, for most women, this subject ranks first, ahead of appearance, career, and intelligence. So to all my fellow men, if you are ugly, poor, and dumb, don’t be alarmed, just work on your sense of humor, and you’ll do just fine.
I happen to be a man who considers a sense of humor to be among the most important qualities in a woman. And so I find it very odd that while I love my family, and love spending time with them, I share very little of my sense of humor with any of them, except my Aunt Celeste and my Cousin Lynda (Who both enjoy this column).
So where did I get my sense of humor from? Was it inherited from my Papa Sam, or did I learn it from watching thousands of reruns of “Saved By The Bell” as a child? Did I construct it myself; based on early interactions with my peers on the playground, during games of red light, green light? Or is my sense of humor actually some Jungian psychological tool that my own mind developed as a way to help itself cope with life?
All I know is that without my sense of humor, I would have long ago abandoned any hope that this life, or any, could be worth living. I love to laugh and I live to laugh. Every single moment of laughter, for me, is pure bliss, and so learning how to find a funny aspect of any event has always been a predominant factor in my self-development.
When kids used to make fun of me in Gym Class for being fat and running the mile slowly, I learned to laugh it off, and to laugh with them, and then to taunt them back with an observation of one of their own mental or physical flaws, and this earned me a lot of respect with my peers, because it showed that I could laugh at any joke, even one where the punch line involved my own gluttonous appearance. Now many years after the fact, I’m no longer fat, yet I still find jokes about fat people to be hilarious, and this is partly because they hit so close to home, but mostly because they are accurately clever.
So I laughed when I listened to the song about informing your future, non-existent grandchildren about what they should pay attention to in life, because I’m just as insane as the singer, often thinking about such things when I have no right to, and this self reflection of my own idiosyncrasy made me laugh, which in turn, made me feel good.
Then, as is usually the case, my overly analytical mind began to think more seriously, and I realized that if I gain so much at laughing at myself, most other people probably do as well. So I decided, then and there, that if I could teach not just my children, but the entire world only one thing, it wouldn’t be how to sing in perfect harmony, nor would it be to hold hands and to smile on each other, and to try and love one another, right now. No, my message would simply be: Learn how to laugh.
Laughter is wonderful, because it’s not just a cure for pain, but it’s also a preventative technique for avoiding pain. And it’s great exercise: smiling uses 17 muscles. So the ultimate irony is that by learning to laugh at fat jokes about myself, I learned how to exercise a little bit, every time that I laughed at my own lack of exercise!
This leads me to conclude that even though I rigorously use a rubbery protection device to thwart progeny, if I were to inadvertently spread my seed and then suddenly pass away, before I could meet my offspring, I would want them to know above all else that they should always turn to laughter before giving in to any other emotion.
There’s always a funny side to things, and if you retrace the steps that led you to your current state of anxiety, depression, frustration, or anger, you’ll often find some bit of self-reflexive irony involved in your situation that is worth laughing at. And if you can discover these ironies and laugh when you are in pain, you’ll feel better instantly. Or everyone will think you’re crazy, and you’ll get committed, which could also be funny.