I have been accused during my years of teaching of not laughing a lot. I have even been accused of being too serious or not being funny. To this I usually respond with a "hmm" while making a straight face like the emoticon to the right. I have sat and thought about this on a number of occasions because the revelation that I am not funny is not one that I hear often from my peers. In fact it is quite the opposite. I have been told by people around me that I am quite hilarious and have also been told to take many things more seriously. So I was puzzled. Which of the two was it. Am I utterly unfunny or am I hilarious. In searching for the truth I have come to a startling conclusion, an epiphany if you will. I am as my peers have judged me. I am utterly hilarious. I have evidence to back this up by random posters on my wife's facebook page. So how is it then that my students sometimes find my to be too serious. I have come to the conclusion that they are not funny. Not that they are too serious mind you, but they are not at all funny to me. I have come up with a hypothesis called the underdeveloped sense of humor. My sense of humor derives from knowing things about thing. A quip about a phrase or a reference to a past experience can have me smiling or even laughing. My sense of humor has developed with my knowledge. I know why the phrase "He eats less than Ghandi" is humorous. My students on the other hand have an underdeveloped sense of humor. They do not know or have past experiences enough to create their humor from collected human knowledge. Therefore; my students have mistaken their inability to understand my sense of humor with me being too serious and have confused my non-funniness with their own. My students underdeveloped humor makes them revert to other forms of comedies. Mostly stink jokes or worse confusing being rude to being funny, which is sometimes the case. That is why they call that type of humor sophomoric. Because it lacks refinement that some older students and some adults have developed.
i agree with some of your students i do not think that you are a very funny people i have seen you smile but i have not seen you really make a funny joke
ReplyDeleteYou are kind of both, sometimes you can be unstoppably funny but sometimes you can be dull and too serious. But I think it is good to be both because if you were too funny, you wouldn't take many things seriously and if you were too serious, you wouldn't laugh at hilarious things or crack a smile or a joke.
ReplyDeleteBoth views are correct. you can be serious, as us all, or you can be hilarious. The kids DO have an underdeveloped humor sense, but when they are older, they may just start randomly laughing because of something they remembered you saying, and just now getting it. Good blog. Makes me think.
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