In high school, I had to do an interview of another student in my class. I do not speak to many people. The assignment was for students to pair up and interview each other for a biographical paper. It was not the kind of assignment that I would have volunteered for, but it was an essential assignment for my grade. What I got was a random classmate.

She had a different sense of humor than I did, big surprise that, and I asked an offhanded question about it. I still recall her answer. “I like jokes about people.” This is an un-attributed remark because I could not recall her name even if I wanted to ask her permission. That is not my point in any case. Note also that my remark about being surprised was sarcasm.

My understanding of this remark is lacking. Why would anybody like jokes about people? Were we created with an innate psychotic streak in us? Is this essential to our fallen nature? It does not make sense to me that we would be so universally cruel in our nature.

Is it just possible that I am not as much a freak as I am made to appear? Aside from being a stand up philosopher, something that is not common, maybe my failure to be amused by insulting people is closer to our natural state. Maybe that is more akin to our saved state. It can be easy to forget that our saved state is not our natural state.

Why is it that entertainment that pokes fun at people does as well as it does? Is it that we are not enough in ourselves and lust after what other people have even when we have more than they do? This is something that I really cannot understand. I take no pleasure in the pain of other people. It is in the heart that I was given to celebrate the success of the people around me.

When the final accounting is tabulated, I doubt that I will amount to much. I have been little more than dust driven about by the endlessly turbulent force of the wind. This does not bother me in the least. Having been one of the faces in the gallery of nameless people of history, I have respect for my fellow man and can be contented with that. Why do so many other people like jokes about people?

Maybe that is my real point. When the people around me are hurt, I feel it too. I see no humor in the wounding of others. Slapstick was not serious and this corruption of humor is. This form of what now passes for being funny takes itself entirely too seriously.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.