I’ve met a number of people that simply have no grasp of wordplay, who don’t recognize absurdity as being funny and who don’t “see” visual humor. In other words, nothing makes them laugh. For the most part, they aren’t unpleasant, they simply don’t have any concept of what’s funny.
My late grandmosther was one of the coldest people I’ve ever known. She didn’t think anything was funny. I once asked my older sister (who had much more contact with her than I did) if she ever remembered our grandmother to kid around, make a joke, or even do anything to lighten a situation. Her response: “I think she did, once in awhile when she was younger.”
My daughter’s SO. The guy takes everything literally. It’s a real drawback in a family like mine, where everybody is always cracking wise. It’s also a pain in the ass to have to explain “it’s a joke” every time something is said.
If you don’t see the absurdity around you, you’re just not paying attention (or you live in a much different world than I do). If you do see it, but choose not to be at least occasionally amused by it, I have to question your choice of coping mechanism. Either way, yech.
My advisor in grad school is the most humorless person I have ever met. She didn’t understand any humor at all in any form. A female undergraduate intern bought her a Mr. Potato Head toy for a gift exchange once. My advisor opened it, thought about it for a minute and then put together the parts EXACTLY as they were shown on the packaging right in front of us. She proudly placed it in her office to stay that way forever and seemed quite smug that she had finally mastered this “humor stuff”. Her husband who worked right down the hall was just as bad but there was a rumor that someone got him to smirk at a real-life fart once but that is unsubstantiated. God I hated those people.
I wonder if it really is treatable? Is lack-of-humour listed in DSM-IV?
Perhaps get them to start off on a course of Jerry Lewis, then work up through Benny Hill to Fawlty Towers. If they can handle Extras, Curb your Enthusiasm or The Office, they’re cured.
When I was a bank teller one of our customers lodged a complaint with our superiors that when he walked into our branch, we were laughing. He thought that it was really unprofessional for bankers to have a sense of humor. Come to think of it, I don’t remember him ever being light hearted. His boss was downright grumpy and mean all the time. He’d try to get me fired for any reason at all.
My boss came out of her office once when several of us were laughing about something and declared, “There is far too much levity around here.” She was positively grim.
Yep, worked closely with one in a group I belong to. I’m sorry now I confirmed him as a Facebook friend - he just doesn’t get it. If I post a lighthearted query (and I tend not to use FB for “serious” stuff) as to why dogs’ brain cells seem to dribble out the minute they cross our threshold, I get a lecture about training, stuff like that. He doesn’t get it in person, either - you have to be very clear that yes, I’m telling a joke now or he’ll just stare. I’ve mostly got him on Ignore or Hide or whatever it is that FB offers, but I just can’t imagine what it must be like in his head. I love a good laugh. I can’t fathom going through life without a little giggle once in a while.
My mom doesn’t have the greatest sense of humor. She’ll laugh at jokes of her own making, but she doesn’t get more nuanced or political jokes, I think because she’s just not as well informed as she once was (she gets most of her “news” from my uncle, who, while a nice man to his family, is bigoted and homophobic). Additionally, she has a drinking habit and has since my sister and I left for college. It hadn’t gotten really bad until recently, but lately her thoughts seem to be muddled.
Even after someone’s made a joke, she’ll sit there with this fake, polite smile plastered on her face and go, “What? I don’t get it. What?” Then we have to explain it to her and she keeps the same smile on her face and still doesn’t get it. I hate it. She used to be a witty, intelligent woman. It’s been hard to see her go downhill the way she has.
I made the gross mistake of inviting a friend of this sort on vacation with me last month. Most tense and horrible week of my life. I’m beginning to believe that in her case, though, it’s part of a larger autistic sort of situation, the complete inability to read social cues. She makes a lot of gaffes and is, sadly, very defensive about it, which makes it all even worse.
A lot of people around me probably think I don’t have a sense of humor. I do have one, but there’s a lot of humor that doesn’t appeal to me. And the stuff that does appeal to me often offends others. Go figure.
I was standing outside a business once, waiting for it to open. Just standing there! A bum walked by and said “I’ll give you $5 to smile.” I thought, hey, you scumly m-f, I’ll give you $20 to sit on my face. But I didn’t say it. I just gave him the evil eye til he walked away. I usually don’t waste the evil eye, but I figured if anyone deserved it this guy did.
But seriously. Sometimes people have a lot on their minds. A friend took me to a play once. This was on a Saturday afternoon. The day before, I had found a spot of blood on my underclothes when I undressed after work. Naturally that was a Friday and I couldn’t phone the doctor until Monday. The play was a drama with comic relief, if I remember right. I couldn’t laugh at the humor and I did laugh at something inappropriate. I was embarrassed about that, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell my friend that I’d found blood on my underclothes and was scared that I had cancer.
I remember reading once that “he who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news”. I don’t know who said it, probably Nietzsche. But that kind of harmonizes with how I feel a lot of the time.
Over the past couple of months I was starting to worry that I was losing my sense of humor. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. I watched plenty of comedies, and I found them amusing, but the best I could manage was a forced fake smile at best.
I mean I was really worried that there was something seriously wrong with me. Then I remembered something I’d heard about how laughter is a social thing and people rarely laugh when they’re by themselves. It’s kind of like how you can’t tickle yourself. And it occurred to me that I had been living the life of a hermit. I just wasn’t going out much.
Spending a weekend away with a bunch of really awesome people put an end to that. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in my life as I did that weekend. And I was definitely making others laugh. Whew!
My boss is utterly humorless. She could sit through Monty Python’s entire output and say “Oh, that was funny.” But only because she might gather she was supposed to think so.
My mother-in-law has a sense of humor, but it doesn’t match mine. That’s rough, because she laughs inappropriately at me, which makes me feel bad. I have a very deadpan sense of humor, and sometimes I will say something pretty funny that my friends or my husband would get, and she will just look at me, or sometimes I will say something not funny at all and she will burst out laughing because she has no idea when I’m joking so she figures sooner or later she might be right.
She: “How have you been?”
Me: “Pretty well; I have been having some hay fever, but haven’t had a migraine in a few weeks, so not too bad.”
She: “hahahahah!”
A lot of people with Asperger syndrome or autism don’t have much of a sense of humor and take things very literally. That might explain some of these people. That seems to be the case for someone I know personally…nice guy, but very serious!
However, I bet a lot of these humorless people seen in work settings actually do have a sense of humor. I think that a lot of people don’t express their sense of humor at work because they are afraid of getting into trouble for being unprofessional or inadvertently offending someone. I have enough social awareness to laugh at jokes others make at work (whether it’s funny or not, and especially if it’s a joke from a boss ), but I never make jokes of my own in work settings because I know many people get offended over dumb things and I don’t want anyone to complain about a joke I made. I also just tend to be a pretty reserved person, so I am not the sort who wants to get attention from others by making jokes. However, outside of work, I make jokes all the time with my boyfriend and friends.
This comes close to describing my husband. He’s a great guy, but not at all playful or lighthearted. He does watch sitcoms and comedians and laughs at the right times, but I suspect he’s taking cues from the laugh track.
He also says jokey things sometimes, but at the moment I can’t recall that he’s ever come up with something really funny.
Plus, he doesn’t laugh at my jokes and I’m hilarious. Yes I am!
Dave Barry had a good column about this topic once, titled “(This Column Is Funny)”. I’ll quote a bit of it:
What was your reaction to the first paragraph of this column? Did you think: “Ha ha! That Nixon sure is a geek, all right!” Or did you think: “This is offensive, cheap, crude, and vicious humor, making fun of a former president of the United States, […] just because he is a geek.”
If you had either of those reactions, you are not Humor Impaired, because you at least grasped that the paragraph was supposed to be funny. The Humor Impaired people, on the other hand, missed that point entirely. They are already writing letters to the editor saying: “They wouldn’t use electric shocks! They would use hand signals!” Or: “Where can I buy a pair of undershorts like that?” Trust me! I know these people! I hear from them all the time!
On another occasion, he mentioned the readers who write in to correct him when one of his “Mister Language Person” columns runs — these being columns in which he gives obviously bogus advice on English usage questions. The funny thing is, they’ll be smugly correcting him on one particular grammar or spelling error, in a column that is brimming with such errors from start to finish.
SMullen, if you don’t mind my asking, what did the doctor say about the blood? (you have touched on one of my deepest fears-that-haven’t-happened-yet, no joke!).
