Poke Fun at Yourself
When you make yourself the center of the joke you are demonstrating a kind of unifying humor. Such self-deprecation builds trust. Dropping self-deprecation means damaging that bond. Maintain it and you look comfortable with yourself, an endearing quality. Even in the face of great difficulty, Will Rogers and Norman Cousins made unifying humor the centerpiece of their lives - and are loved for the healing effects of it. Here are six quick examples from others.
1. My friend Sylvia’s mother gave this toast at her 60th birthday party: "Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician."
2. Phyllis Diller said, “I know what got me into comedy... puberty!”
3. Lily Tomlin, in her one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by Jane Wagner, said “If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?”
4. I have a friend who laughs easily, at funny things he reads or even his own foibles. He says "Laugh alone and the world often thinks you're an idiot, but they may laugh along."
5. Numbers are not my strong suit. After I had added up a budget on a hand calculator and come up with three different totals, my business partner once quipped, "There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can't."
6. "I had an IQ test. The results came back negative."
- anonymous saying
Kid About a Common Situation
When your humor highlights what we have in common, you and I feel more like “us.”
• After the mad cow scare, a subscriber to my newsletter, mailed me this bumper sticker: "Montana. At least our cows are sane!"
• Commenting on the human condition: "God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day."
• I saw this emblazoned on the tee shirt of a rotound man coming out of a San Diego beach shop: "The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard."
You can find more kinds of unifying humor simply by reading what is around you. For stating the obvious, look at some newspaper headlines:
“Study Finds Sex, Pregnancy Link”
- Cornell Daily Sun
“Lack of Brains Hinders Research”
- The Columbus Dispatch
Lily Tomlin is my inspiration for crack-up funny and unifying humor. She said, “Nobody is here without a reason. ... I like a huge range of comedy ... but I always wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.”
Then there are those people who appear to have no humor whatsoever. Usually that lack covers other concerns. What effect do they have on others? Read about it tomorrow.
