Felix Culpa! or Humor in the midst . . of mistakes!

Jazz musician Miles Davis said, "Do not fear mistakes. There are none." As children, our earliest experiences of humor and comedy came from recognizing mistakes. Mama made a funny face -- that is, one that is out of the ordinary -- and we laugh. Daddy put his shoes on his head, and we laugh. It is amazing that as soon as we start to put together the puzzle pieces of reality, we start to recognize - and laugh at - incongruity!  When we begin using words, we begin to rhyme or use nonsense words. (see Dr Seuss!)
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The stronger my sense of humor gets, the more I am able to laugh at myself and my mistakes. I have many embarrassing moments, which stop being embarrassing as soon as I can laugh at myself. I was at a movie theatre in Manhattan one day, waiting for the previews, when a couple in the row in front of me began to unwrap a white powder in a paper napkin. "Do you want some?" he said to his date. And a stranger to his left said, "May I have a little of that?" Suddenly, a sense of outrage rushed to my head like champagne bubbles and, drunk with indignation, I decided to be a Drug Free Citizen and sound the alert. In my loudest, authoritative, James Earl Jones voice I declared, "I can't believe you are passing that out right in public view. I've had enough of this." (In my defense, drug deals had just started to infiltrate my own apartment building stoop and I had had enough.) 
"What? What?" he replied. "Did you think this was cocaine? The popcorn needs salt." 
Ha! I shrunk into my seat as the whispers of what had transpired undulated through the crowd like the "wave" at a football game. 
About that time my friend arrived fresh from the snack bar with Coke and popcorn. "What's the matter?" she asked. "Nothing," I replied as I stuffed my mouth with popped kernels, "the popcorn needs salt."
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Well, without mistakes I would have no stories to tell. What can I say? I keep myself amused.

Humor in the Midst of -- Argument?

Share your story! How has having a sense of humor affected your life? It makes it impossible for me to get all the way through any argument. Damn. My last political argument with my brother got me so frustrated that, at one point, I found myself jumping up on the couch to even out his height advantage. He jumped right up next to me and continued jumping up and down like a monkey. Well, the argument disintegrated into laughter! Now whenever I am tempted to enter into a futile argument with my brother, I start by standing on the couch -- and of course the argument doesn't quite materialize. 

Do you have a story about how your sense of humor interrupted your life?


Humor in the Midst of -- argument?

"The conditions of life might include error"

Our sense of humor can reveal some of the truths of the universe. That is, the fact that we have evolved a sense of humor.

Humor is about being slightly off balance. That is why we always laugh at someone falling down. We come into this world of gravity after having lived 9 months in a gravity free environment, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to come to terms with gravity -- and laughing when we fail.

A child sees you put a spoon in the middle of the air and then laughs when it flies, of its own accord, through the air to the ground. Why doesn't it stay where you put it?

Evolutionarily speaking (if indeed one can speak evolutionarily) humankind stood up, then fell down and a sense of humor was born.

Scientists are continually making sense of the universe, only to fall off balance with a new discovery. According to an article by Glenn D. Stakman and Dominik J. Schwarz in the August, 2005, "Scientific American" the harmonious universe may be out of tune. In other words, they've found more discrepancies in a theory. This is why scientists laugh.

Nietzche says "the conditions of life might include error" and so our sense of humor -- laughing at incongruity and slips from balance -- may in fact reveal to us a deep truth about the universe in which we live. Everything that exists is constantly creating and breaking patterns. Set-up, build, punchline. 

This blog is dedicated to finding "Humor in the Midst . . -- of Gravity".