I was talking to a mom about her signing up her daughter for Girl Scouts and I thought of the leader my daughter had some years ago. (not bashing Girl Scout leaders, just this particular leader!). The leader of the group was a young and beautiful upper middle class mother, and she had no sense of humor whatsoever. Never saw her laugh or even smile, and any supposedly humorous thing I said to her was met with a blank look. We had to work together selling cookies and I was a nervous wreck, she actually creeped me out with her utter seriousness. She was, for a volunteer working with kids, rather unpleasant and told all of us what a lot of work it was to get trained and organize the group, etc… I’ve met a couple other women like this, not any men that I can remember. They’re very quiet, very serious, very…rigid? Even fundies have a sense of humor about themselves. Old sick people can still be fun to be around. Is it depression? Is it I’m not telling the right jokes, or I come across as the big dopey flake that I am at heart?
I’m not seeing a factual question here. Moving to IMHO from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
What a humorless response!
My mother-in-law has a sense of humor, but she doesn’t “get” most jokes. She can see things in movies that she thinks is funny, or laugh at a story, but tell her a joke, and she will say “I don’t get it.”
I run across people like this once in awhile, and it’s very off-putting.
One gal I know and see regularly in a fitness class that I’m in a couple times per week. I know a fair bit about her life. She’s a mid-30’s mother, very earnest, driven, she’s a good mom actually, but just very, very… earnest. Literal-minded is the best way I can put it. I have never ever seen her do irony, sarcasm, anything remotely jokey at all. She’ll smile at times, and make observations that may make her smile (in other words, she’s not all gloom and doom or whatever; definitely not depressed), but I wouldn’t call it a sense of humor by any stretch of the imagination.
If I say something mildly jokey to her (such as “hey, did you forget to take your arthritis medication today?” or something like that, with a wink, say if she’s limping or something), she’ll give me a very serious response (“I don’t have arthritis. Never have. My mother had it and one of my brothers, but I’ve never had any sign of it”. — that’s typical.) She doesn’t get insulted, just doesn’t really respond to a jokey tone in a jokey way.
Another trait I’ve noticed about her, besides the fact that she has no sense of humor, is that she is utterly uninterested in anyone else’s life. I just can’t ever picture her having any heart-to-heart friends. Granted, her own life is incredibly full and busy: all centered around her own home and family, which of course is perfectly fine. But I’ve known her for a couple years now, and have never seen her show one iota of interest in having a conversation with someone in which she asks about their life, asks after their family, their interests, “how is your son’s ear infection”, that sort of thing. She’s just simply not interested.
That sounds really self-absorbed, and as if she’d be unpleasant to be around, but she’s really ok to be around; she’s not selfish or snotty or anything. I admire that she’s really driven in several areas of her life. But I can’t see that it would be possible to get beyond the most superficial of acquaintance with her, which is what I have now. She’s sort of an automaton – treats everyone with the exact same polite level of detachment. I’ve really encountered very few people like her in my life.
Heh.
I used to work at a very small (ca. 12-15 employees) company in which the owner rarely cracked a smile, much less laughed. His girlfriend worked there too, and she was a fun, chipper, upbeat jokester… yet my boss never seemed happy to be around her (or around anyone else, for that matter). I found out from a different co-worker that the owner grew up in a large family in which the parents maintained a distant and unaffectionate relationship with their children. Although I enjoyed working at this company and never found the owner to be less than pleasant to work for, I always felt really bad for him.
I have a friend who doesn’t understand sarcasm. So I’ll say something ‘deadpan’ and he’ll correctly me, genuinely believing I’m mistaken in what I’ve said.
I have a friend who is a mute, and she generally takes any sort of jokes or friendly ribbing like I’m picking on her. I think that probably she wasn’t able to socialize as much growing up and when people talked to her it was probably all fairly direct and unambiguous what their intent was.
She gets jokes as jokes, but not friendly, palling about sorts of jokes.
My former boss was completely humorless, and it was one of the main motivations in me quitting. If I made any sort of sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek joke (really mild stuff, we worked around kids), she would get this offended look on her face and say, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She made me feel very socially awkward because all my best attempts to be light-hearted were met with a disapproving stare.
Months after I quit, a friend’s boyfriend interviewed for a job at that company. He said to me, “The lady who interviewed me was really serious and scary. I tried to make a joke and she just stared at me.” I said, “Oh my God, was her name T? I could have told you not to make any jokes!”
You mean “correct.” (Un-smiley face here.)
Oddly enough, my daughter had two humor-impaired Girl Scout leaders (Hey! Peer-reviewed!). Eventually she just gave up on the whole organization. Now we just let her pick up a meaningful set of values off the internet. (That’s a joke.)
I’ve had the humorless bosses before. The toads who think that making a joke or laughing at something at any time demonstrates that you’re not taking things seriously. :rolleyes:
I ignore these people like the plague in real life, so I don’t know any of them at this time.
What’s harder to spot are the people who are faking a sense of humor - the humor impaired. They’re humorless themselves but they realize that other people have this thing called a sense of humor and they’re trying to fit in. So they’ll never get the joke but they’ll laugh at it anyway when other people laugh or when they spot the other social clues that tell them something happened. And many of them probably believe they have a sense of humor - on the surface they’re behaving like they see other people behave.
Three tests to see if somebody is humor impaired:
- They don’t get irony. Humor that acts like non-humor is invisible to them.
- They’ll laugh at a non-joke if you tell it right. If you tell them something that sounds like a joke, they’ll laugh at it even if the “joke” makes no sense.
- They can’t make up anything funny. If they’re telling a joke, it’s one they heard from somebody else.
I have known, and worked with, several people in the comedy business who would appear, to many people, to have no sense of humour. It is almost like a point of honor not to laugh at things even if you think they are funny. I thought the recent Adam Sandler movie Funny People captured them pretty accurately.
My second-grade teacher was a strict disciplinarian, and nobody ever saw her smile. She was a stereotypical “spinster,” who had no use for interpersonal relations. At a PTA meeting, she commented, “I hate all children, especially boys.”
I’m one of the people likely to be posted about, actually. I’m not quite humorless, in the sense that I appreciate a good joke, but I’m one of those ponderously serious people at heart. Depending on how IMPORTANT! the current endeavor is, I may be amused by the joke (but now let’s get back to work) or I may find it irritating unless it’s just a passing quip (hey c’mon quit goofing off).
Here on the board, 90% of my posts answer questions or offer my opinions, “just the content”, not cleverly. I’m not good at clever.
PS:
That was my 6th grade teacher. You’re not from Valdosta by any chance are you?
I’ve only known one person utterly devoid of a sense of humor - a former coworker, Chip. He was fussy, prone to argue with people over trivial things (such as how to list people’s names on a roster), and not once in the three years I knew him ever cracked a smile or did anything but stare at people when they made a joke. A barrel of laughs, that guy.
Funny thing is, a friend and I thought he finally made a joke when he told us one day that he hated our bosses and wasn’t coming back one Friday afternoon. On Monday he didn’t show up, and by Thursday our bosses began to ask if anyone knew what happened to him. He never came back.
I know some people at work like that. I have taken years to overcome shyness, and joking around with people is one of my ways to be friendly; also to lighten the atmosphere due to the fact that working with the poor and often desperate is not particularly a barrel of laughs. I know that the people I immediately work with can laugh and make jokes when the situation warrants it. When I try to joke with these other particular people, however, they look at me like I just squatted on their desk and took a crap on their keyboard. It makes me wonder if I’m just going about it the wrong way. Maybe it’s just me they don’t like?
Hey! Stop talking about my mother-in-law!
Man. A sense of humor is one of the core values that helps to define what makes us human. It’s completely unfathomable to me to have the kinds of personalities that have been described in this thread-to me to exist like that would be a living hell.