Different Kinds of Funny

When Big D and I were newly married, he told me once that I was not funny.

He was kidding.  Sort of.  You see, he sometimes called me Bunny, and he just made up a little rhyme about how I wasn’t a funny bunny.  Well, it stuck and was sort of a running joke of his for a long time. 

But truth be told, Big D really didn’t think I was very funny.  He thought I was witty.  For some reason this affronted me a little, and I set out on a mission to prove to Big D that I was indeed not just witty…but laugh-out-loud funny too.  I don’t know that I ever really proved anything to him, but I got a lot of mileage out of the fact that I was nominated for Funniest Home School Blog three years in a row.  It was a personal victory of great magnitude that I actually won this past year.

All joking and ribbing aside, Big D and I are just different kinds of funny.  Big D is more slapstick, silly, goofy funny.  Big D will go all out for a laugh.  He is loud.  He can be obnoxious.  He writes rap songs.  He does the worm.

 I am funny in a quieter way.  I daresay that there are many people who know me that don’t even know I’m funny.  Do you remember the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie, You’ve Got Mail?  Meg Ryan’s character at one point is lamenting that she always thinks of witty and poignant things to say to someone after it’s too late to say them.  That is me, in a way.  I often do that, or I think of them and don’t have the nerve to actually say what I’m thinking.  Let me tell you…blogging and Facebook and the like have opened up all sorts of new avenues for my humor…in both good and bad ways.

If someone asked me which of my children were the funniest, I’d probably have to say Dirty Harry. 

 He has a quick wit and quirkiness about him that makes people laugh.  He also has the obnoxious thing going for him, that I don’t find particularly funny, but which his peers admire greatly.  Regardless, he is funny, and I probably laugh at things he says and does more than the other two.

Jack Henry, still a baby, is cute-funny. 

He makes us laugh with his funny faces and gestures.  He enjoys the attention, so will repeat what we laugh at, which makes us laugh more.  It’s hard to say what direction his sense of humor will take, but so far he’s pretty comedic.

Bonny Annie is the more serious one of our crew, I’d say. 

From the time she was very small, she was literal to the point of ridiculousness.  It took her forever to get jokes because she had a hard time seeing and understanding irony or sarcasm.  She’s gotten better at this as she’s aged, and her sense of humor has improved.  Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a side of her emerge, especially around her friends, that I have not previously been privvy to.  The other day she was invited to an end-of-the-school-year pool party.  She told me of a conversation that she and her friends were having about how pale their skin was.  At one point my Bonny Annie piped up, “I’m so pale people sometimes mistake me for a bucket.”  She said I wouldn’t believe how her friends howled.  One girl even posted it as her facebook status…a true sign that one has said something really clever.

“That was really funny,” I said.  “You must get your funniness from me.”

“Well, yeah.  Maybe,” she answered. “I think I get my smart-funniness from you and my stupid-funniness from dad.”

I’m glad she said that and not me.  Like I said…there are different kinds of funny.

A happy heart makes a face cheerful.

~Proverbs 15:13