No sense of humor or just a weird one?

It seems somewhere along the line, I lost a gene. Yes, lost! I don’t know where it went, but I do know it got replaced by another. So how do you go about losing the “sense of humor” gene and getting it substituted by a “serious” gene-if such a thing is even possible? I haven’t got the slightest clue, but the thing is sometimes I’m convinced I don’t have a sense of humor or at least a normal one…

Is there any evidence? I can argue a complete case on facts alone, I’m afraid. Imagine a typical fifth grader, now multiply that times five, make one kid blonde, the other fat, one skinny, the next one tall and the last one short. Ok, hold on with me and multiply each kid by two. Got it? Your typical 11 or so year old boys always seem to congregate around a certain fixed area of a school’s playground during brake time, to basically joke about life and/or pick on each other. For the sake of argument lets say behind the little school cafeteria. So yeah, there’s laughter, giggling and probably a tear or two. Now, zoom into the fat kid, never laughs genuinely- by now he’s become an expert in the art of faking a laugh- and rarely says anything, because what he thinks is funny just doesn’t score too high on the other kids’ laugh-o-meter. Yes, the poor guy had to cross jokes out from a joke list he carried around…who does that anyway? Ladies and gentlemen, surprise, surprise, the fat kid was me.

The creepy thing is how the heck did the fat kid- I mean me- become such a grandpa at that age. Its a long and complicated story, but I’ll bother you with the boring details anyways. Most kids played soccer, I played Nintendo and Playstation, and not kids’ games, having way older brothers I was used to games with storylines and the like. Most kids did nothing on Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, not me, I had kickboxing lessons. Weekday afternoons I would be tutored while other kids ate Dorito after Dorito watching cartoons. Other kids watched cartoons while I had developed the healthy habit of reading…books for older people, because I had an obsession with all things military, even if you can’t tell that now. You can probably still hear the humor gene crying out in agony…poor little guy. Oh yeah and for a good part of my childhood I didn’t have all the cool cartoon channels kids had in cable TV. No sir, my dad decided to get Direct TV, which would have been awesome, except Cartoon Network somehow died and I only had the Disney Channel. No Dragon Ball Z or Saint Seya (weird anime kids watched back then) for me, just plain old Mickey Mouse and Goofy and the gang shooting what I can now only describe as dry jokes, at me. I’m guessing right about that point the funny gene died, and the other genes bought it a little translucent coffin and gave him a good ol’ fashioned gene burial with military honours and all, since he fought a long hard battle, but died fighting.

As if that wasn’t enough, more and more grown up books made it my way. But it doesn’t end with that, not at all, there were movies and games, too. And I mean brainy movies and really complex games that made me think for me to get from level 1 to level 2. During the time most kids were almost done developing some kind of a quick-wit for humorous replies, I was very versed on the causes of World War II and becoming a real conossieur in the intricacies of tuning a Toyota Supra, in racing games of course. If you don’t find that being weird, I think you probably should book an appointment with the psychaitrist. Oh and I liked Friends on TV, but the freaky thing is that at 11-12 years old, I could understand most of the jokes, it probably helped I had watched American Pie during the summer. Funny thing is that I laughed at the really brainy stuff in the series and the movie, and didn’t much care for the more obvious jokes.

By the time I was 13 I had devoured many books on military history, long novels- not Harry Potter, I found those really simple- and watched war movies, dramas and many sitcoms on TV. I also developed quite a curious taste in music: old school heavy metal, punk rock, alternative, gangsta rap and modern metal. Most kids fell in love with Blink 182, 311 and Sum 41, but I wasn’t to crazy about them, I found their music to be too childish and superficial. Now that’s quite a mature statement, but maybe too mature for a 13 year old boy. Did I mention I had also learned the basics of computer programming and hardware and designed levels for a game in that time, too? No? well...I did! I spent days doing that. What was happening in the real world, at school? Oh nothing much, just that some of my friends were getting girlfriends, while I was oblivious to girls flirting with me. My pals would joke around, and since I was never funny I didn’t know what was funny, so as any normal pre-teen would do I copied from them, TV and the movies. Sounds like a perfect plan, right? Wrong! With my weirdly grownup taste in entertainment, my jokes only made sense in my head-surprisingly they were gibberish when I said them out loud. There was something missing, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Now I know it is called: pop-culture. Looks like grandpa, became great-grandpa.

From the time I was 14 to when I was 18, the formative years of teenage guys, I only succeeded in becoming more and more serious. First I was a computer and history nerd, I dove neck deep into all sorts of history books and computer stuff, Office, Visual Basic, you name it I could probably learn how to do it, by devouring a book in a surprisingly short time, for a kid. I made jokes, which of course made only me laugh, about history and literature, by now you should be shrieking in terror and grabbing onto something, hard, at the sight of such an abomination. The only pop-culture I knew was in the videogaming scene, TV and movies, far from the reality of going out to party with your friends, as my pals did. I knew what was funny in quality TV sitcoms and really funny movies, but not in real life. Then I slowly started morphing into a strange mix of a party animal with a librarian. Why? I danced, drank and went out to party, but the moment I opened my mouth, the sound of crickets or the club’s/bar’s music would follow closely afterwards. Most opened their mouths letting out words that would be received by laughter, and loads of it, particularly because the audience was, most of the time, drunk out of their minds. This is when the serious gene completely replaced the funny gene- insert maniacal laughter here.

As I grew up I started watching loads of old comedy films and TV sitcoms, you know when writers weren’t high, and really worked on scripts. I surprisingly found myself rolling on the floor laughing to old films like “Back to School” and really old sitcoms like “Seinfeld” or the SNL episodes of the 90s. I can picture it now, the serious gene met the funny gene’s widowed wife, and they had some drinks, got a bit drunk, hooked up some times and eventually moved into an apartment together. The result: a weird sense of humor and a messed up laugh-o-meter. So after an upbringing as a mature, serious and worldly citizen-or at least I fancy myself as that-, I have narrowed down funny to fitting within certain parameters, creatively. If I laugh at something it must appear to be normal on the surface, but really be funny or it has to make something that is really mundane, funny. For example, dry British humor and really witty sitcoms like 30 Rock crack me up like crazy. And that is exactly how my jokes are: I think hard for a single joke, dress it up creatively and see if it fits within the parameters, then I shoot….the result? crickets most of the time, loads of them, and yeah, the background music at bars and clubs, too. You might object saying that funny is natural and spontaneous, to normal people of course, but to someone that grew up without a clue of what is funny and what is not, spontaneous just doesn’t cut it and I don’t have a clue of what is naturally funny.
So I ask you? No sense of humor or just a weird one? I myself, am still fighting with my pillow to decide.