On Being Serious. Or Not.

Steve Martin as the Pink Panther.

For some reason it hit me the other day that the congenitally serious person kind of bugs me. I am not referring to the rare person not blessed with a sense of humor, but to the person who refuses a sense of humor. As if humor was below his or her station in life.

I have never had that problem. As a matter of fact, my sister once told me that the male species, as a rule, hits the age of 15 and stops. I had to identify. The oddest things get me sometimes. Many years ago and late at night, my wife told me her uncle's name was Cuthbert. We laughed so hard we cried. It's really not that funny, but at the moment the currently out-of-circulation name tickled us and wouldn't let go.

Laughter is human. Uniquely human. Maybe even necessary to one's sense of humanness. Sometimes when we are laughing with friends or family we know that things are good, and a very few times in life, we know that things are almost perfectly good; and we want time to stop at that moment of enjoyment, but it doesn't.

I know we live in dire times of serious problems, and that our eternal destiny is no laughing matter, and that our problems are serious, but, well . . .

Take the word obfuscate. It is funny to me, no matter what is going wrong; but only seeing the definition, the literal, the univocal, makes us less human.

And that is not funny.