Funny ha-ha, funny peculiar

When I was a child, we had this slim book in our library that was called Funny Ha-Ha Funny Peculiar. It was all about news reports and headlines, advertisements and billboards and more, where there were bloopers, typos, malapropisms and just plain garble where there should have been carefully edited, cogent, coherent text. It did not make too much sense to my young mind at that stage but, as I grew up and read more newspapers and magazines, I started finding it very funny, even the peculiar bits. My sense of humour was honed by what I watched on television, what I read and what I listened to at home especially, where my parents’ dry sense of what was amusing strongly coloured my more obvious differentiation between what could safely and correctly be laughed at and what was a gaffe of mammoth proportions that should, for all purposes, be ignored.

Part of my growing up was a great deal of laughter. I was tickled in my fat little tummy by my mother, my father and many others who travelled across the city and even the world to see me burp and I chortled happily as I deflated rapidly in the middle after that rapid consumption of the contents of a large bottle. I giggled madly as my small friends and I chased a rabbit across the lawn and watched children older than us play on the tennis courts and balance on the sea wall. And I went into hysterics when a classmate in school showed us how he could burp heartily but then expelled his air content rather violently and noisily through another aperture. And I swallowed chuckles when I re-told the most ridiculous joke last night that was fabulously cute on the surface and amazingly sad and politically iffy under it.

But in all this, I have never been able to tell a joke with the right kind of mood attached to the punch line. In fact, very often, I forget the punch line altogether and end up feeling not just stupid, but socially inept, too, even as my audience looks carefully away from me and wonders whether it is time to laugh or to get up and go away. And I just cannot add all those wonderful embellishments that go into spreading out the suspense and setting the scene in a fabulously dramatic manner. I leave that to the experts and just bumble along, occasionally making people crack up and dissolve into mad giggle-bouts just when they need to be straight-facedly sober.

My own funny bone comes from a situation that I know well and am comfortable with. I can relate it to people I am easy with, those who know me well enough to get past my integral shyness and can understand not just my accent, but also my madness. Which is a select few, but it works well with and for them and we generally spend all our time together bursting into laughter for no reason at all but that we are together and having fun. I once spent a four-hour train ride sitting with one of my closest friends, the two of us in gales of giggles that completely puzzled her aunt, who was sitting just in front of us. When the two of us chat over the telephone, anyone listening to either of us is generally left open-mouthed at the hysteria that never seems to end, the chortles and chuckles that go on and on and on…

But isn’t that what friendship is all about? Someone to laugh with?