You love having a personal comedy club and refuse to let anything stop the good times from rolling. You certainly won’t intrude on your girlfriend’s privacy or cause her any pain, but you’re also unlikely to know how (or if) she will withstand tough times when tears trump laughter.
If you answered mostly C’s . . .
You have positive ways of getting to know people who may hide behind humor, and you know what you’re looking for, beyond a good laugh. You’re happy to let him grab attention or entertain, but you’re more interested in his character traits, ability to share in a partnership, and ability to reveal more about himself as time passes and his need to amuse and impress (hopefully) subsides a bit.
Faulty Shortcuts to Funny
If you’re not naturally funny, avoid these faulty methods for getting laughs:
* * *
Don’t
Why Don’t
Drink until you’re hilarious
Because people are just laughing at you, not with you, and they’re also feeling sorry for you and not sleeping with you either way.
Borrow jokes from your favorite late-night-show monologue
Even if you don’t get caught plagiarizing, there is (A) almost no not-awkward way to insert a joke into natural conversation, and (B) no excuse for inserting humor into a conversation prefaced with “Wanna hear a joke?” unless you’re under ten years old and the joke begins “Knock knock.”
Recount, in detail, your favorite episode or the most hilarious episode of Family Guy, Duck Dynasty, Murphy Brown, etc.
Falls between “your dreams” and “work gossip about strangers” on the list of “most never-not-boring conversation topics.”
Try your hand at physical comedy and fall down a lot
People are just as likely to find you funny as they are those who are drunk, epileptic, or in the hospital.
Find a random target and mock her appearance (race, weight, bowl cut)
If this works as a way to make your friends laugh, it also works as a way to know your friends are assholes (and that you’re in good company).
Having a Good Sense of Humor
Since funny people aren’t always fun to be around or work with, they rarely make good partners (as explained further on p. 127). After all, the professional funny guy who makes a living complaining about his wife in front of an audience probably goes home to lingering resentment rather than a trusting partnership. Even lay funny people have trouble with the stability marriage requires. You don’t usually want a joker so much as a person whose view of life’s frustrations, paradoxes, and inconsistencies is more likely to make you laugh and disarm tension rather than a person who rants, attacks, or whines about unfairness and ramps up the unpleasantness. So when it comes to a sense of humor, don’t confuse possible candidates with stand-up skills for definite stand-up people.
Here are three examples:
• My girlfriend usually laughs at my jokes, which is great, but when she doesn’t, I get nervous and start to wonder what’s the matter. I can’t tell whether she didn’t like the joke, or was offended and is now stewing over it, or is just annoyed with me and maybe our relationship. I can’t ask her why she didn’t like it or if something’s wrong because I know that will just get on her nerves. My goal is to be able to make her laugh without having to worry about whether she does or not.
• As an awkward girl, I usually use humor to make social interactions easier, but if I’m trying to meet guys, being funny only gets me so far. I know most people say they want a partner with a sense of humor, but I don’t know how to be seen as more than just “the funny girl” and not “a cute girl who’s funny.” I guess I’m overdoing it or giving out the wrong vibe, but I’m not sure how to fix it. My goal is to be the right kind of funny (i.e., the kind that doesn’t neuter me or the guy I’m talking to).
• Like a lot of funny people, I’m not always a happy person; I get bad depressions sometimes, and when I do, the only jokes I make are dark (and maybe unsettling, and not really funny). The problem is that the girls I date are usually attracted to my sense of humor, so when I stop being funny and start being a miserable fuck, they freak out and leave. My goal is to find girls who think I’m funny but accept me when I’m not.
Once you find you can be funny, it may be hard not to put on your funny persona when trying to meet and impress people. Hiding behind jokes seems to make you more interesting and gives you a way to prevent boredom, avoid silence, and make it easy to leave people wanting more. Such joking, however, is like using water wings or training wheels: they makes things easier at first, but you must eventually give them up if you want to acquire real skills. That’s why dropping humor is the only sure way you can make authentic personal connections, even though, without it to rely on, you may drown or crash.
It’s natural to become dependent upon the response you get from being funny, particularly when you’re trying to impress someone you care about. Unfortunately, most funny people find it hard to connect with others and to relate to the world in general, and while being an outsider provides the skewed perspective that creates humor, it also causes a sense of isolation that makes connecting with other people extremely difficult. That’s why making people laugh becomes the easiest way to relate to them, and laughter the clearest indication to someone oblivious of subtle social cues that a connection is made.
The downside is that, when laughter doesn’t happen, it can compound that sense of isolation into something even more painful; comedians “die” or “bomb” if they can’t get a laugh, whether it’s publicly onstage or in a one-on-one situation. It’s worse when silence makes you wonder whether your girlfriend is offended, annoyed, or ready to depart, so it’s natural to want to reduce your anxiety by keeping her laughter flowing.
Unfortunately, the more you let fear drive your social behavior, the more it blocks a real relationship. Your uncertainty and neediness will become obvious and make your girlfriend feel responsible for your feelings, which tends to wear out the most entertaining relationship. So your goal isn’t to reassure yourself that she’s happy and not annoyed; it’s to let her feel whatever she feels and see how her feelings mesh with yours, or not.
Sadly, you can’t guarantee that she’ll like you when you stop joking. What you can do is try to find interesting things to do together and live up to your own standards for being thoughtful, considerate, and a good listener. Then, even if things don’t click, you’ll know that you’ve done your best to build a relationship, have no one to blame, and will learn from the experience.
If your style of humor saps the sexiness out of your image, you may have overdeveloped your comic talents as a way of getting attention when you weren’t getting it for just looking good. Anxiety and neediness are great inspirations for humor, but they tend to deflate sexual chemistry; lots of people like to laugh at the guy who jokes about jerking off or at the girl who tells fart jokes, but there’s a reason that models are silent. Just as nobody can simply change their feelings, you probably can’t alter what you find funny, or how humor affects your attractiveness; it’s hard to order up the “right kind of funny,” even when you know exactly what you want.
If you can keep anxiety and neediness in check, then you can rely less on humor and more on finding other social activities and common interests. Don’t assume that humor is a hindrance and that attractiveness and frequent dating are the key to finding a partner; that would be depression talking, which, like Mr. Show DVDs and nearsightedness, is something every funny person is likely to have (see below). Ignore self-critical thoughts, try to find things you like to do, and look for someone who might have what it takes and also seems genuinely interested.
Using less humor may leave you feeling unnoticed and disconnected. If, however, you rate yourself more by your determination and character than by the number of laughs you get or pounds you weigh, and if you stay focused on your search for someone equally solid, you will find someone who takes you seriously and then discovers
a bonus in your sense of humor.
When it comes to generating humor, depression is a double-edged sword: it can provide you with a unique perspective that cuts through sentimental platitudes and stirs the deep laughs that acknowledge pain, but it can also make you irritable and nasty while putting thoughts in your head that devalue your worth, your future, and the respect of others. It’s not surprising that depression can sometimes make you attractive and at other times threaten or damage relationships. If depressed feelings make you act like a miserable human being, especially if you make no effort to manage them, you can’t expect relationships to last. Even if your friends basically accept you, they shouldn’t tolerate abuse. If they do, your relationships aren’t healthy for you or them.
If, on the other hand, you look carefully for a friend who can tolerate your depressed moods without needing you to smile and doesn’t take your unhappiness personally, and if you can also behave decently even when you feel like shit, you can find a relationship that will last. You don’t have to get rid of depression to find a good relationship, but you do need the strength to control nasty behavior and to look for the right kind of person to ignore your occasional nasty thoughts.
It wouldn’t hurt to do your best to figure out a way to manage your depression so that it doesn’t do as much damage to your life. You may feel less funny for a while (or just feel less, period), but you have to decide whether enduring periods of painful self-hatred justifies the periods when you’re the wittiest guy in the room (and too miserable to enjoy it).
Just having a good sense of humor can make you bad at finding or keeping relationships, but if you remember to value yourself for what you have to offer, not for how much you can amuse people, your humor can certainly add pleasure and maybe wisdom when you’re developing and keeping close relationships with people who like you as a person, not just as a performer.
Jerks and Jokes—Why So Many Comedians Are Miserable Assholes
Unless you live in New York, Los Angeles, or an airport hotel, you have probably had little direct contact with professional comedians. Most of us have met funny people, such as that cousin who does the meanest running commentary at family weddings or the guy at the office whose MS Paint skills make group projects bearable, but these are civilians who are good at getting laughs. There’s a difference between being a funny cousin, brand manager, or orthodontist and being funny for a career. The former are funny for fun, and most of the latter are funny because their miserable lives depend on it.
By and large, professional comedy types, be they stand-up comedians, improvisers, or just writers (ahem), aren’t just funny for a living, but have chosen this living because they believe it utilizes the one skill they have, a skill developed to overcome an otherwise crippling shyness, tragedy, or sense of otherness. They are funny because their ability to function depends on it. They often need laughter so as to feel whole, which is a good motivation for surviving in the competitive world of professional comedy, but a terrible way to live your life if you don’t want to hate and doubt yourself 99 percent of the time.
Since most of us have also met depressed people—that other cousin who always gives the angry-drunk toasts at weddings, or the guy at work whom you often catch staring into space or crying in the bathroom—we know how unpleasant they are to be around. However, unlike your garden-variety depressives, who just hate themselves, most comedians have the confusing mind-set of “I hate myself; why doesn’t everybody love me?” Then they hate themselves for the desperation that pushes them to get onstage all the time and work their asses off for approval and success—just as much as they hate the people who do love them for being stupid enough to love such a miserable asshole.
We’re sure that some comedians are actually well-balanced, confident, highly functional individuals—maybe those guys who used to define their comedy by the blueness of their collar, or those YouTube comedy stars whose core audience is ages eleven to twelve, or, inexplicably, ventriloquists. But in reality, the funniest comedians can be the biggest bummers to be around. Then again, if most comedy people weren’t miserable, they’d have way better stuff to do than kill themselves making all us assholes laugh.
Humor and Marriage
When you’ve come to depend on a partner’s humor, the absence of humor can feel like the loss of marital happiness. Your marriage may still be healthy without humor, however, just as it may be unhealthy with it. A fun parent isn’t always good one, and a grumpy spouse isn’t always a bad partner. So never assume that someone who is fun to be with will ensure you a jolly marriage, or define marriage by the way it makes you feel, whether that feeling is loving, lustful, or full of laughter.
Here are three examples:
• I’ve always liked my husband’s sense of humor, but now that we have kids, he enjoys joking with them and leaving all the negative stuff for me, which forces me to be bad cop to his eternal good cop. It’s not fun for me, and I resent that the kids can’t wait for him to get home but see me as a grouch or their prison warden. My goal is to get him to stop the joking around all the time and share in the tough part of parenting.
• My wife was happy and funny until her sister died, then she got a depression that still hasn’t lifted. Now she seldom smiles and is often angry, and therapy doesn’t seem to help. I miss the woman I married and don’t like this humorless, pissed-off version nearly as much. My goal is to find a way back to our old relationship.
• I fell in love with my husband’s sense of humor, though I knew he was funniest when he was drinking. Unfortunately, his drinking has increased over the years; he used to have fun on weekend nights only, but now that he’s drinking more frequently, it’s not making him any funnier, and it is starting to put a strain on our life together. He insists he still just drinks for a laugh, but he’s on thin ice at work and the kids notice how hungover he is. My goal is to get him to take his drinking seriously.
It’s natural to want to nourish and maintain the good feelings you get from humor (or a good night’s sleep or a personal victory at work or cocaine, etc.), but it’s not reasonable to feel that you should be able to maintain the laughter and good feeling indefinitely, especially in a marriage. Otherwise, when something happens that makes laughter impossible—which, in any long-term relationship, is inevitable—you’ll feel like a failure and your response may well make things worse.
If the humor your husband used to share with you before you had kids is now given to them instead of you, it’s hard not to feel demoted and disregarded, particularly when parenting makes you feel tired and irritable and all the not-fun parenting tasks fall on your shoulders. You were hoping for a partner who would help you see the fun in parenting, not someone who would monopolize the fun and force you to rein them all in. If you’ve lost faith in his ability to be a responsible parent, you’re also likely to put even more responsibility on yourself, which deepens your resentment.
Your partner might listen if a mutual friend or family therapist warns him that his joking with the kids undermines his responsibilities and endangers his marriage. It’s just as likely, however, that any criticism will make him feel more aligned with the kids as leader of the persecuted group of scolded fun-lovers and increase the distance between the two of you. If that’s the case, give him more opportunities to do solo parenting, even if you don’t like the way he does it or don’t feel comfortable putting him in charge. After all, you have no control over his parenting if you’re separated or divorced, and you have good reason to believe he’s not totally incompetent (and if you don’t, you have a better reason to wonder why you married him in the first place). Withhold your criticism even if you see him make mistakes or believe the kids are harder to manage after he hands them back.
With luck and a little time, he’ll have to deal with the less attractive parts of parenting and figure out his own methods for managing difficult behavior, other than laughing at your attempts to control it. Meanwhile, you’ll get a chance to relax and watch him learn the
hard way. You may never regain the lighthearted companionship of your preparenting days, but if you can tolerate his parenting style and still believe you’re benefiting from his contributions, you may have good reason to feel you have a good marriage.
Losing your wife’s laughter to severe depression can also feel like a personal loss, even when you know the reason for the depression or, at least, know the reason isn’t you. Your helplessness may cause you to feel you should be able to cheer her up, or, if your efforts fail, to blame her for having issues with oversensitivity, overattachment, or insufficient time with a shrink. Depression can happen to people who have good marriages and senses of humor, and, indeed, a good sense of humor may be a risk factor (see p. 126). In addition, support from friends or a therapist is no guarantee of a cure. So don’t let your wishes for the old rapport or expectations about controlling depression make you critical, because you’ll just make the situation worse.
Instead, accept the pain and respect the good efforts you’ve both made to survive it. As long as you can control your expectations and anger, you can help her fight the negative ideas depression puts in her head, widen her knowledge of what does and doesn’t help, and urge her to try any treatment that offers a reasonable hope of improvement. Maybe you can’t get the laughter back, but if you can accept the person who is living with depression, you can forge a strong partnership that can tolerate life’s sorrows.
A kind of humor can flourish with drug use that can be as addictive as the drugs that make it possible. If that’s the humor that brought you and your husband together, then it’s understandably difficult for you to confront him about alcohol use, even though you see it escalating and interfering with the responsibilities of adult life. In addition, if you’re critical, he’ll remind you of how much you liked his party persona before, accuse you of trying to change him, and threaten to take the good times away. So, no, there’s no way you can expect to hang on to the fun drunk while getting him to stop drinking, and it won’t help to criticize him for not being able to be sober and still funny.
F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship Page 13