January 26th, 2006
I remember way back in the 1990s (eh, Sonny?), when the Internet was either mostly unheard-of or in its embryonic stage and people still resorted to using such barbaric forms of meeting other people as personal ads in newspapers and telephone dating lines.
Divorced from my first wife, and suddenly alone, I decided to try my luck at such meeting-aids. One thing that struck me pretty hard (aside from the fact that chatting on the phone through those services could be bloody goddamned expensive) was the fact that practically everybody included the "requirement" that whomever they were seeking must have a "sense of humour."
Well, I had to think about that for a while until I realised that pretty much everyone I had ever met appreciated some form of humour. I felt like I did, all my family, friends, enemies, acquaintances, business associates, co-workers ... ALL of them had some sort of sense of humour. In fact, I had a hard time even coming up with someone whom I could honestly say didn't have a sense of humour. And I spent five horrible months visiting him as he withered and died from AIDS; he had an excuse. (Five months that were worse for him, by the way--I didn't mean to say: "poor me, I had to watch him die").
But the only way I could conclude that everyone else I knew had a sense of humour was to remind myself of the Sesame-Street simplicity of normal human relations that is this: All people dance to different drums. Yes, I know a lot of people that I would hardly share a laugh with under even the best of circumstances, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the fact that the person does have a sense of humour, even if I don't share it.
Now, I don't know if I have ever been accused of not having a sense of humour myself. Certainly not to my face, though probably behind my back (I am guessing) but, heck, there aren't many meetings I attend at work where I am not cracking wise about something. It's both a positive and negative personality trait that I am not afraid to go for a laugh in a crowd--even an obvious crack if I feel like it :-) People say I am funny in this blog, in the things I do and say at home, in the way I conduct myself at work ... in fact, if somebody says I don't have a sense of humour, what they are really saying (though they probably don't realise it--or get the point) is that they don't share my sense of humour. I'm very intelligent; maybe my humour is too smart for them? As Garrison Keillor would say, "I don't know, I'm just asking."
So reading somebody's desire to meet another person who "has a sense of humour" says an awful lot about the person making the requirement: It says "intolerance". It says, "my way or the highway", or, perhaps, "there's the world as I see it and everything else must be wrong" ... it says that the requirement comes from an amateur, emotionally swampy, ignorant person.
It says, "Run, run away!"
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