He Thinks I'm Funny

A friend of mine who's opinion I deeply esteem (except when he is wrong), has just told me he thinks I am funny.


We have been acquainted for years and years and I was surprised at his failure to notice it before.

Not that I think I am funny. It’s just that I am often enough told I am to believe that that is the general impression I leave with others. In fact, as I responded to the Thief, on the same social occasion I met the spouses of two co-workers and during both introductions I was tagged “the funny one I told you about” by the introducer. One of these co-workers (who was decidedly intoxicated) then turned to me with excited expectation and said, “Say something funny right now.”

I am well aware that the off- the- cuff humor that earns me the above mentioned credits is displayed almost completely by accident on my part. Sometimes when, I have set a group of faces laughing, I don’t actually even “get” my own joke—this becomes truer as I age.

Usually, it’s some sort of physical comedy that I luck out with. I am an absent minded klutz and it’s been such a part of my nature now for years that the stumbles and falls I take or the idiotic mistakes I make fail to embarrass me like they really should. I think my calm demeanor in the face of the truly bizarre predicaments I find myself in confuses others in to believing I posses a well timed comical grace rather than just a simple minded callousness toward humiliation.

It’s the “dry” humor that prompts people to call me the funny one, the things I say that have that tilt that makes them just ironic enough without tipping so much the truth of it slides off, that takes people by surprise. That’s what they like and it does come easily for me, but not on demand.

I can do something idiotic on demand sure, since idiocy is inevitably right around the next corner for me anyway, but to make the comments there is a formula. There has to be an issue out there, one that is too apparent to everyone present for it to be pushed under a rug and ignored, and one no one really wants to mention. Any thing really, examples may include, but are not limited to:

a bad hair cut, an empty bank account, a festering sore, crashed bike, dog fight between civil adults ready to explode, a cat fight that just ended, a thrown vase, spilt milk, dead bodies, gained weight, tears that can’t be sucked up or hidden, accidentally professed love, obviously unrequited love, cruel words that can’t be taken back, mud on the clean floor left by a house guest, irreparably destroyed friendship and so on.

Two months ago I returned to the real world after some little personal tragedy. I could gage the seriousness of said tragedy in the minds of others based on how long an individual looked me in the eye with the sideways-cocked stare of sympathy, or how tightly the lips pressed together when I was given the “hang in there” smile. Regardless or personal feelings though, it seemed that most who I have encountered since this thing, have known the societal dictate that something must be said. So with each new meeting on my first few days back I braced myself to receive compassion. One on one I can absorb it all in to a “thank you, I am doing ok” and walk on still upright. En masse I can’t absorb, I must deflect.

So when I popped in to the office of three persons, all of whom are “chums” in one way or another (but I am not familiar with the souls of even one of them), I found that mundane details of loss are really quite amusingly silly if spoken out loud by the grieving. I can’t recall a single word I said then but I can recall that I gave perhaps a fifteen minute monologue and that at each pause they sincerely and loudly laughed. I do recall that as I left I overheard one comment to the other on how funny I truly am.

At my desk my thoughts were that depression makes me hilarious. I am able to turn sadness in to a gift of comfort to those faces with the uncomfortable task of consoling me. I’ll bet that if my entire family were eaten by mountain lions, I would become the life of any party. Injuries make me true riot.

After all of this self reflection, I wonder about the Thief. How is it that he had escaped the illusion that I am a comic for so long before this? But he said, “I would never have said that you were a funny person.” He gave me the time frame of his epiphany. It corresponds exactly to when he began to break my heart day after day.

He added that not only am I funny, I am witty too. I take full and unabashed credit for my wit. I do have wit, it’s no accident. That the Thief makes the distinction between wit and humor increases my affection.