I have a great sense of humor. (Voted most humorous for my senior superlative!) I can play the role of the fool or the wit, depending on my audience and mood. I don’t do jokes or puns, but rather tend to point out something that’s ridiculous and make it funny.
I usually don’t have to try very hard to at least make people smile.
But the reverse rarely happens. It’s because many people do not rely on situational humor, but on jokes. It’s not that jokes are predictable or anything, but the punchlines are either excessively bawdy, lame, or go right over my head (never said I was a genius). At one time I could fake-laugh with the best of them, but now I can’t be arsed to. I feel weird, sitting there while everyone is cracking up and all I can do is wonder if I’m the only one who didn’t “get it”. But this changes if it’s a one-on-one interaction. I’ll fake-laugh in that situation because doing so would be impolite. But I have no problem keeping my stone face if there are other people in the room who can take up the slack.
Hrm. I don’t enjoy watching magicians for the same reason–this feeling of being manipulated. Sometimes restaurants will have someone going from table to table, doing tricks. I hate having to sit there and watch this person perform sleight of hand, then sit with my friends ooh-ing and ahh-ing, pretending to try to figure it out, feigning amazement, etc.
Wow, that makes me sound kind of obnoxious. Heh. I usually just quietly nurse my beer and wait for it all to end.
The term for someone with absolutely no sense of humor is an agelast (Greek for ‘without laughter’).
Famous agelasts include Isaac Newton (who, according to the story, laughed only once in his life – when he was asked why anyone should study Euclid) and Josef Stalin.
Agelasts come up when I teach about comedy in Antiquity (especially New Comedy and Roman comedy) as they show up as stock characters and are frequently the target of the humor in plays (they tend to be misers, pimps, and vain soldiers) who are blow-hards and try to spoil the fun of others, so they frequently are exposed as fools or are the targets of others’ jokes.
They do exist. Dave Barry has written about them occasionally. For example:
[…] But before we can treat Humor Impairment, we have to be able to recognize it. It can affect anyone. YOU could have it. To find out whether you do, ask yourself this: 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, Barry talks about the clueless responses he gets to his “Ask Mr. Language Person” pseudo-advice columns, in which he pretends to be an English usage expert answering reader questions. The columns are just parodies, played only for laughs.
They should be obvious parodies, but some people, the Humor Imparied, just don’t pick up on that. And as he says, some of them will write to scold him for errors they’ve found in one particular answer, somehow failing to notice that the entire column is nothing but a bunch of errors.