Nothing to laugh at...

“In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me laugh.” - W. H. Auden

Yesterday, I told my brother he's the funniest person I know. But I had to amend it to the second funniest person I know. If you were to ask me to name the absolute funniest person I know, I wouldn't be able to do it (not a bad problem to have, huh?)
My brother Adam is hysterically funny and is definitely one of the wittiest people I know. He has such a deadpan delivery of lines that you can't help but laugh at his stories. He told the story of working with the fire department to find the body of a person who drowned in a river. Afterward, one of the officers came up to him and a colleague to debrief them. “How do you feel right now?” the officer asked. The reply from the guys? “Hungry.”
Last year, my sister and I took Adam on a cruise just after he graduated from college. We kept a book of quotes from the trip and one of my favorites was, “Sleeping late, drinking, staying up until 1 a.m. This is what I used to do in college… last week.” Another was when my sister was questioning him about women.
Erin: “What's the fascination with twins?”
Adam: “There are two of them.”
Erin: “Then how about triplets?”
Adam: “Nah, that's a crowd.”
SJ is definitely in the running for the funniest person in my life. Our conversations and emails are filled with one-liners and inside jokes. In fact, one of the reasons we started this blog was to see how well our humor translated to people who are not either her or I. She told a great story last week about a friend of hers who got stuck in New Orleans during the first hurricane. She and her new husband were stuck in a hotel that was eventually abandoned by the workers. They made it out of the city by giving $100 to two guys who drove them out in a vehicle they had just carjacked (“Nice car… and you don't even need a key to start it! So, where are y'all from?”). SJ, her husband and their friend had a great time picturing the scenario in that car and the possibility that the newlyweds got in on the lawlessness. “The fuzz! Take this gun and shoot out the back window!”
I have some pretty hysterical coworkers (although I laugh at some of them because of their stupidity rather than the humor in what they say). Last week, we were talking about someone who committed suicide. While that is obviously not a laughing matter in itself, I couldn't keep a straight face during the following exchange:
Woman: “How did he kill himself?”
Man (dropping his voice into a very serious tone): “I heard it was suicide.”
I had a friend once who helped me develop awesome abdominal muscles from our phone conversations. They were conversations that lasted for hours every night and I spent the majority of the time laughing hysterically. He once got food poisoning and turned it into a whole story about the tape worm living inside him (I believe its name was “Wormy.”) He would have to eat certain things to keep the worm satisfied. A sample email message from when he went out to Colorado last year: “There was actually a vote today and I am the new Mayor of Breckenridge.... the vote was actually done by myself and a conifer tree along some remote trail... I took its silence as support and moved ahead with the swearing in ceremony... which was actually a "swearing at" ceremony because I was blocking the trail with my podium and people were trying to get by...”
Once I got over the concerns I had about being friends with someone who thinks like that, I actually found it pretty funny!
I had some rough days recently and the worst one was when I realized I had gone almost all day without laughing. But a quick call to SJ took care of that. I'm lucky to have enough people in my life to ensure I will never go a day without finding something to guffaw at. Now, get off your computer and go find something to laugh about. If you can't, get in touch with me and I'll give you SJ's number.
-KAT