The Life of the Humor-Impaired
“I have very happy hair. No matter how serene and composed the rest of me is, no matter how grave and formal the situation, my hair is always having a party.”
— Bill Bryson, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, p. 31.
That paragraph is, quite simply, brilliant. I will never in my life write or say anything as clever as that. I’m humor-impaired, and I’ll be the first to admit it. If you ever find a funny line in one of my stories or novels, I assure you, it was completely inadvertent. I meant the line seriously.
I don’t write humor, and for the most part, I don’t understand it. You’d recognize me immediately at a comedy club; I’d be the one in the back wondering why everyone else is laughing.
That said, there are a few things that can make me laugh. Drew Carey’s Whose Line is It Anyway? used to crack me up. SuperDickery, especially its Seduction of the Innocent image gallery, rolls me in the aisles. Janet Evanovich’s novels usually have a line or two that get a chuckle out of me, and the snarkiness of House, MD, can make me grin. But that’s about it. If Norman Cousins is right and laughter is the best medicine, I can only pray I never, ever, suffer a debilitating illness. Or that Bill Bryson keeps publishing books. I mean, how do you improve on passages like his description of snowmobiling?
“Shrieking hysterically and jettisoning weight via my bladder with every lively bump, I flew through the woods as if on an Exocet missile….” (p. 154).
That’s kind of the experience I get reading his prose, actually.
drupagliassotti @ June 24, 2008