With all the brain studies being done, I have wondered why no one has figured out why there are as many different senses of humor as there are people, it seems. Have you ever noticed how even your own sense of humor depends on the context of from whom you hear or to whom tell a joke. I enjoy telling jokes because when my listener laughs, I also laugh all over again. No matter how familiar I am with the joke, I can almost pee my pants if the person I have told it to is laughing hysterically. Other people's laughter is contagious to me.
You can almost diagnose a clinically depressed person when they laugh at a joke but nothing on their face shows it. Sounds of laughter creak out of their mouth but their eyes don't slant or leak, their cheeks look like they just had a very tight face lift.
Some people tell jokes and begin laughing and snorting just before the punch line which you can't understand because of the noise from their laugh obfuscating the words. More confusing is when I tell a joke and the listener begins to laugh so hard...BEFORE I get to the punch line...that I am never able to finish the joke.
However, the most frustrating to me are the people to whom I tell a joke (that many people have plainly enjoyed before) but this person stays poker-faced and says, "Is that the joke? I don't get it." More puzzling yet, is the person who interrupts you in the middle of the joke you are telling them so that they can tell you about a joke of which they were reminded by the piece of joke you have had time to tell them; those who need to ask, before you tell a joke, whether it is 'off-color' because they don't listen to 'those'. I usually stare at them, in disbelief, and tell them I only tell black and white jokes that lack humor.
Nevertheless, anything that makes me laugh is good tonic and I go back to those sources frequently. There are friends who seem to know what I would find funny and there are those who tell me I am on their joke list and send me Angel poems or Bible passages. Bare acquaintances send me "My best friend prayers", and others send jokes I heard 50 years ago with poorly disguised attempts to make the humor fit this era. I can forgive them because I remember the original and realize they weren't even born during the era that joke was first heard and have no concept of what made the joke so funny in the first place.
I'm told that joke telling is an art. Nothing is more embarrassing to me than to tell a joke, get distracted, and mess up the punch line. I remember jokes by subject association so, after my many years on earth, there are few subjects that don't remind me of a joke. I miss that humor on the Internet is often no longer a joke but, rather, lists of funny things. Try as I might, I do well if I can remember a few off the list but it is never as funny as a joke with a total surprise ending that catches people unaware, like the old couple sitting at their kitchen table when the husband asks his wife, "Whatever became of our sexual relations?" As she looks like she is thinking about the answer, she comments, "I don't know. They didn't send us a Christmas card this year."
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