I Walked Right Into That One

Or, A Funny Guy's Quest To Develop A Sense Of Humor

I didn't realize when I started school at age five that I was any different than other kids. My likes and dislikes were strong, and I couldn't understand why other kids didn't share my passions for, say, eagles, or reading. It was a sure fire road to unpopularity, and I took it, oblivious to the risks. Fast forward to fourth grade, where I met a kid named Donald. Donald was popular, or at least he seemed so to me. (I still owe him a quarter for a Pez™ candy dispenser.) Donald was funny, always joking around, and best of all, he could laugh like Paul Winchell's Tigger (“Hoo-hoo-hoo-HOOOO!”) I resolved at once to be more like Donald, a watershed decision in my life, which has haunted me ever since. I couldn't do the Tigger laugh, but I tried to squeeze the humor out of everything in my path, which must have annoyed everything in my path. I developed the ability to identify and exploit humor wherever it could be found, but also frequently misidentified it and left a trail of damp squibs wherever I went.

If unpopularity was my goal, I should have been preparing my acceptance speech. Even without the affected humor I would have remained eccentric, scrawny and unathletic. If there exists a primary school where such a child could lead a quiet, un-bullied life, I should be intensely curious as to its whereabouts and details. It certainly wasn't where I went to school, and the cruelty and abuse I endured make it easier to understand some school violence than I wish I did. I must have survived, as I am writing this 50 years later. The impulse to joke about things also survived, and was so deeply ingrained that it came partly to define me, up until the time that my musical skills gradually began to provide me with an alternative path (slightly more successful) to peer acceptance.

In the 10^th grade the most popular kid in my class – handsome, athletic, talented, smart – deigned to confront me in private and, point-blank, gave me both barrels about my flippancy. I was taken aback. Only my mother, herself a comic genius, had ever bothered to tell me I needn't be clever all the time. Now here was the proverbial Homecoming King, possibly risking his reputation by taking a moment to address the Class Nobody with the goal of helping me to shed some of my self-inflicted annoyingness. I could not then appreciate this unmerited gesture, and I'm sure I looked askance and muttered some vague concession. (He went on to be a pastor and I a missionary, but I digress.) I was not cured, but the self-awareness I lacked was, for the first time, at least brought to my attention. One has to start somewhere.

I stayed funny, though. A friend of mine and his girlfriend invited me to watch The Exorcist on HBO with them so as to provide comic relief. It was considered to be the scariest movie then playing, and I delivered Mystery Science Theater 3000-type running commentary to help keep them from entering too deep into the horror (and almost certainly spoiling the film in the process.) My humor sometimes proved convenient, and was allowed to stay.

At twenty one I was lead guitarist in a fairly popular local band, itself soon to become a casualty of its own volatility. Our lead vocalist/bass player was a clever songwriter and often an insufferable jerk. One day I happened to overhear him telling another bandmate, “Blake has no sense of humor.” WHAT??? Me, Mister Hilarious, no sense of humor? I'll show him, I vowed to myself. The next time we met I saw to it that I was in rare form, firing one-liners and ripostes like naval broadsides. He laughed. I was good. I had a sense of humor! Guess I showed him, didn't I?

Uh, no. I'm not sure how or when it happened, but my insecurity endured (and doubtless endures still), blurring the line between merely being funny and taking myself far too seriously. That is until…okay, I don't know until when. My conversion to Christianity in the early 80s almost certainly played a part, as the Christian is charged “not with thinking less of one's self, but of thinking of one's self less.” I somehow began to see that the bass player's observation about my lack of a sense of humor was based not on my abilities as a real-time gag writer, but my wounded pride, ever on the defensive of what dignity I could salvage as a starving musician. In short, I couldn't take a joke.

My new faith required far more of me than a mere realignment of my self-expression; it forced me to face my failings and foibles, but not, it turned out, without mercy, itself a cornerstone of Christianity. I could cease to take myself too seriously, without having to become a somber killjoy, even toward myself. Nonetheless, my default tendency toward jocosity continues to provide me with the challenge of reining it in.

One of my dearest friends, and the smartest guy I know, is, naturally, possessed of a scathing wit. One day he and I jointly concluded that, in spite of our being humorous, neither of us had a sense of humor. This was no observation of any particular personality trait so much as an indictment of one's own character. We had our work cut out for us.

This distinction is not widely known. I recall an anecdote in which a female acquaintance of a pre-fame Steve Martin, now universally considered to be one of the funniest people in the world, observed to a friend, “Poor Steve – he has no sense of humor.” This was doubtless thought by the author to be a delicious irony, a complete failure to recognize what was soon to be a defining phenomenon in modern comedy. But in her admirable effort to be seen as having been short-sighted (and thereby having a true sense of humor), she fails in her attempt to be wrong. Steve Martin may well have taken himself seriously enough (his excellent autobiography, Born Standing Up, provides all the insight one needs to reach a conclusion), but his famed leaps into affected self-importance, cluelessness and total absence of self-awareness were coolly calculated bids to sacrifice his perceived dignity on the comedic altar. These eventually, and ironically, earned him all the respect one could possibly garner in the entertainment world, facilitating his escape-velocity ascent as an author, musician, screenwriter, director, playwright and serious dramatic actor. If Steve does indeed possess a sense of humor (a humility ideally suited to his dizzying achievements), then its connection with its his mere funniness is murky at best.

Am I developing a sense of humor? As with any strong personality trait, this one occurs more readily in some people than in others. I can only identify two moral virtues in myself that come easily to me: One is that of being considerate (i.e., I try to let other drivers change lanes when possible, or not to hinder their progress), and empathy (I can feel others' pain, and can easily be moved to tears by those of another.) As for the rest, I am naturally impatient, perfectionist, lazy, disorganized, and sometimes just plain stupid (a moral, not mental deficiency, as defined in by Christ in Mark 7:22 as “folly”.) As for a sense of humor, one needn't be funny (at least not intentionally) to have one, and a good comedian might not. The two are not merely interchangeable. The great Alan Alda put it best: “'Stop me if you've heard this one...' Pow! Now that's funny.”

(P.S.: Donald, if you're out there, the 25¢ I owe you has, with compound interest, achieved the amount of approximately $32, not adjusted for taxes and inflation. You know where to find me.)