Do you have to be so picky about the lights / music / temperature?

Cripes! My human suit is so finely calibrated, ain’t it? And itchy, too. Well, tough noogies. We’re both stuck with it until I reunite with the mother ship.

* * *

Sometimes HSP seems to stand for highly serious person. Where are our highly sensitive humorists? Who can help us remove the sting from the human suits we were born into?

No-holds-barred quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan sets the bar high for poking fun at one’s own vulnerabilities. In doing so, he’s won my devotion. I’m alternately fascinated, alarmed, and challenged as guffaws rise up in spite of my sense of what’s appropriate to laugh about. John Callahan’s bravery, insights, and irreverence inspire me to take my own self less seriously.

If we can make each other laugh about ourselves, if we can allow others to laugh with us, then maybe we’ll all be more inclined to find the lighter side of sensitive.

Then we’ll not only be okay, we’ll be downright giddy by the time the mother ship returns.

Flickr photo: He knows, Doctor.. He knows, by Mr McGladdery

Related reading: Funny Practice, Pep Talk | Embrace Corny

“What did the waiter say when the couple … no, wait, that’s not it. Sorry. … A couple sits down at a table in a restaurant and orders the daily special. When the waiter asks … Oh, rats! Just hang on. How did that go?”

I’m a big fan of funny. Who’s not? Laughter heals, opens doors, lightens spirits, and rights perspectives. But what if laughter’s elusive?

Plenty of times, the thought of finding the humour in a situation, or – even worse – being the humour in a situation, feels impossible and unreasonable. That’s when funny practice can save the day.

My husband and I use funny practice when we get into a spot of trouble with each other and the sagging mood gets old. Then one of us will take the plunge and begin to practice being funny. The jokes are lame. The innuendos fall short of their mark. The punch lines peter out. The puns have to be explained.

But at some point – and it doesn’t take long – the mood shifts. We start laughing about the poor state of the humour. One of us will look at the other, usually with an expression of slightly pained compassion, and say, “Keep practicing.” We do. And that’s enough to make all the difference.

Funny is a muscle. Use it or lose it.

Flickr photo: kickin’ it prehistoric, by erin MC Hammer.

Related reading: Play Anyway, Hero Practice

British writer Tim Moore has charmed me thoroughly. He writes irreverent, utterly hilarious travel memoirs with the twist that he’s frequently and unabashedly incompetent at what he sets out to do.

My favourite Tim Moore adventure is told in French Revolutions, in which he hoists his unfit body onto a recently purchased bicycle and sets out to follow the route of the 2000 Tour de France six weeks before the real race begins. What follows is a tale of mishaps wound around Moore’s keen devotion to the lore of the Tour. Whether he’s begging his wife to drive over from England so he can get a ride up the Alps or cheapskating his way through France’s lesser known lodgings, he recounts his bumbling journey with enough muscle behind his wit to make me a devotee.

No, I’m not very interested in competitive sports in general or in the Tour de France in particular, but I’m hooked on any writing that makes me laugh out loud – and Tim Moore’s a professional in this regard.

“A big-faced man with a moist neck made me pay up front before entering my name with difficulty in his soiled register of the damned; as I trod carefully towards the lift he issued a two-tone grunt of dissent and without looking up thumbed at a dark stairwell. My fourth-floor window overlooked a forgotten courtyard full of dead pigeons and an avant-garde installation entitled One Hundred Years of the Fag End. Inside, the view wasn’t much better. The wardrobe was the size of a child’s coffin and contained a vegetable. Rolling back the tramp’s blanket on a bed of institutional design, I beheld a pillowcase that might have been used to filter coffee. But of course it hadn’t: after all, what’s the bathroom towel for? Still, clicking off the Bakelite switch with wet hands I wished I’d used it. The shock was so violent it flung me halfway to the bed – not bad seeing as the bathroom was a shared one right down the end of the corridor.”

~ Tim Moore, French Revolutions

My next favourite Tim Moore book is an earlier one called Frost on my Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer, in which he revisits the Victorian-era Arctic adventures of Lord Dufferin. Again, Moore exploits his own weaknesses for the sake of his readers’ glee. This time, the setting is colder. Beginning with a crossing to Iceland on a container ship and ending on Spitzbergen, a Norwegian island well into the Arctic Circle, Moore recounts his own trip along with the history of Dufferin’s, the two stories interweaving in starkly contrasting ways often involving Dufferin’s competence as compared to Moore’s.

“Going down was worse than going up, and somehow required me to bellow out a detailed live commentary of the movements of my limbs. By the time I staggered back to the road I was drenched with rain and sweat and walking like the infant Bambi.”

~ Tim Moore, Frost on my Moustache

I’ll be eternally grateful that Moore has been willing to sacrifice himself for the public’s benefit. Both books reside permanently in my toolkit for lightening up, since a reread of either provides a reliable fix.

“It’s like being trapped in an elevator with my own music.”

“He’s been a pawn in my little recovery game.”

“Everything’s very in-between the trapezes right now.”

“Is dog hair your sole medium?”

Pluck them from the conversation that gives them contextual meaning and some phrases can go on to live long, meaningful lives on their own. Capturing these phrases in a little blank book so they can be remembered later creates a repository of hilarity triggers which, when browsed through later, provide a great way to lighten up and evoke memories of good times.

After fifteen years, the first entries in my family’s out-of-context quote book, each just a short string of words, are as evocative as scent, conjuring whole scenes frozen at the moment of capture. It helps that the speaker’s name, the date, and the location have been noted for each quote, but that’s an embellishment on the basics. The main thing is to grab the pen before the phrasing fades.

Some people seem to get more frequent quote book billing than others – pithy folk who can turn a phrase with skill. During the time I was housemates with a friend and her five-year-old daughter, years ago, I had to keep the quote book close by at all times because they were naturals at silliness, at glibly producing the capturable quote. Visitors to our house got in the habit of walking in through the front door and saying, “Hi. What’s new in the quote book?”

And I may have married my husband for his quote-book-packing quick-witted propensity:

Me: “I think in another life I would be a mechanic.”
He: “I would be a ladder. Or a toupee.”

Or this one:

Me: “Did you iron that shirt?”
He: “Well, I sat on it, and I was hot.”

Additions to the out-of-context quote book need not be limited to the purely hilarious or to things spoken by people you know. It’s all about whatever sparks your interest to the point of wanting to remember it later. Overheard bits of conversation can be included (I overheard one man say to another at the Vancouver airport: “I never told you this because I was kind of embarrassed, but I named my dog after your dog”). And mangled English translations from menus appear in our book with some frequency (”Chicken interlarded with bacon – à la pheasant”).

Kept on the coffee table or in the kitchen – wherever the comedy lurks – the out-of-context quote book makes remembering easy. And later, browsing through the book alone or with others wrings lots of laughter mileage out of that first spark of wit.