I think my superpower would have to be making people laugh. Whether I intend to or not, I’m great at getting people to get their minds off of more serious matters and just laugh for a while. In high school, I made straight A’s, and people who didn’t know me very well thought that I was a very serious person because of my grades and the fact that I loved to read and write. Never mind that I rarely studied — I just loved to read, wrote well on essays on tests and papers that were turned in for grades, and listened well in class, for the most part. Only my closest friends knew that I could actually be pretty funny — and that I was wicked sarcastic. In high school, I always said, “I’m gonna write a book someday called Some People Think I’m Funny.” Then I decided to ditch that idea, because I was certain that people would twist it around to make “funny” be something not affiliated with humor, but with mental illness or sexual preference. A high schooler knows the high school herd mentality, after all, especially when she has been the butt of many of its pranks and jokes…
I enjoy helping people laugh, though, because there’s too much darkness in the world. There’s too much sadness, stillness, and seriousness out there swallowing up the good stuff. Even when I’m not necessarily trying to be funny, if I can help someone smile — even because of something silly I’ve done, it’s worth that to me. I’ve been blessed to win several awards in the Tennessee Mountain Writers conference category for Humor over the past decade — 1st and 3rd places this year. I love writing humor. My friend Angie said to me after my wins this year, “I don’t know how you do it. There’s not much in the world to be happy about.” Sometimes that’s true, but there’s almost always something to laugh about and that can lead to some happy moments, at least. My pieces this year revolved around a wailing cat on an airplane from Nice to Rome, where they were playing the love theme from Titanic over the PA system before take-off and two nuns sitting down in front of us (I was certain to administer last rites); and me slicing my finger open with a Pampered Chef Quikut Paring Knife that cost $1.50, calling 9-1-1, passing out, being taken to the ambulance whose drivers first dropped my gurney, then let it careen down our driveway momentarily, etc. Neither one was, in and of itself, a funny situation. It was how I looked at the situations, reacted to them, and told the stories that made them funny. But when you’re Murphy’s Law Incarnate, you get used to craziness just sort erupting all around you for no apparent reason; therefore, you learn to deal with it in some way other than gracefully, because grace is not in my skills portfolio. Self-deprecation for the sake of laughter, however, is there in a ready and steady supply.
Now that I’m sitting here thinking about it, maybe I’ll still go back someday and write that book I thought would be great in high school. Because, no matter how you define funny, some people do think I am. At this stage in my life, why not just roll with it, right?
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