Writely Wednesday 1: Humor & Truth

(I meant to post this last night, but for some reason, saved it as a draft instead. Here it is.)

      Jean posed an interesting question about yesterday's post (Tuesday) in comments. Jean asked, "I can't tell, is this fiction or your real life? The 'getting sober' comment clued me in that it might be fiction."
      A portion of my reply: "Unfortunately, Jean, it's only slightly exaggerated."
      I've run into her question before. My humor is basically based on exaggeration. I have something bad happen to me, and from that kernel, I expand it into a humorous (I hope) story. All humor, I think, has a grain of truth in it.
      I seem to naturally attract more than my fair share of accidents and flubs. So I usually have something to write about it. But without those events, I don't have the spark to write something. That's why the humor posts dried up during the worse times of my back injury. I could only write so much about staring at the ceiling and physical therapy, and then the well was dry.
      In college, I had two different humor columns, one at a college in Arkansas and one at a college in Oklahoma. I won a lot of awards with the Arkansas one; my Oklahoma column was cancelled. The difference? The college in Arkansas was a community college and had mostly older people enrolled and no students in dorms. They found columns about life outside the college interesting and funny, which happened to be what I mostly wrote. But the Oklahoma column was written for a college newspaper that was mostly read by students who lived on campus. They wanted stories about college life, of which I had only a few. They mostly responded to stories of my disastrous dating life, but to my horror, they would assume that the columns were totally true.
      Example: I wrote a column about a date that ended with the riot police being called out. Now, the date was bad, but it stopped well short of needing the police. I thought that would be obvious since the story included a fire, an UFO sighting, and Lord forgive me, several Dolly Parton references. (I, uh, had a fixation on her then.) But several students actually thought I spent a night in jail. I even had one college professor seriously counsel me about what future employers would think about my record if I continued in my criminal ways. Although it hurt when the editor -- a woman who didn't find much funny in the world -- cancelled the column, it was a relief, too. (When my column won an award later, the editor told a friend of mine: "No one else must have entered." She was wrong on that, and I wish I could tell her that today, but she's a highly successful journalist in a major city while I'm just in customer service in the financial realm so what do I know?)
      I try to make it clear when I write when I'm attempting to be funny and when I'm being serious. Sometimes I know I do me a disservice by making light of hard times in my life. It has a tendency to make people think that I'm not suffering or that I don't need their help because I'm able to make a joke or two about it. Be that as it may, humor remains my defense against terrible things. Somehow if I can laugh at a problem, I can deal with it.
      Not that humor can handle everything. It can't. There's a great movie with Emma Thompson called Wit, based on the stage play of the same name. Emma's character, a learned and witty college professor has to confront cancer. Although this isn't the theme of the movie, I carried away from it the profound (to me) realization of the limitations of wit and humor. In other words, wistful thinking aside, humor is not the best medicine when confronting a life-threatening disease. It may raise your spirits and help you endure, but it won't make cancer cells go away. Take your chemo and fight the good fight.
      I have confronted the limitations of humor several times in my life. At my father's funeral, the skirt string of one of his elderly aunts broke as she leaned over his coffin. There was a doubtless funny moment as her skirt fell and family members scrambled to preserve her modesty. Even now, I can't find the humor in it. Maybe someday it will become a funny story that I will be able to tell, but not yet.
      I guess another facet of my humor is that I try to be not cruel. I don't like humor that is hurtful. I mostly stay away from satire because it can be quite mean-spirited. Peter De Vries said, "The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance." I'm definitely in the catch-and-release program and proud of it. I hope to catch you and give you a few more laughs in the years to come. And that's about all I have to say about that. Good night!