I Hope You Can Take Make a Joke

Laughter is probably one of the greatest gifts given to us by God. And whether you believe in God or evolution, it doesn’t really matter. Somehow, we ended up with this extraordinary ability to laugh.

And we’re apparently not completely alone. Scientists have identified laughter-like or play vocalizations in a number of animals, including great apes and even rats. But humans seem to have taken laughter to an entirely different level. We don’t just laugh while playing. We use humor to communicate, to bond, to flirt, to defuse tension, to deal with tragedy and sometimes simply to make getting through the day a little easier.

Think about what laughter does. It gets us through terrible times. It entertains us. It relieves tension. It connects us to other people. It can turn strangers into friends and make an ordinary dinner memorable. The list goes on and on.

You could even argue that laughter is as important as love. Maybe more so. After all, a cynic could argue that love was merely invented chemically or biologically to ensure the survival of offspring that were originally conceived because of a sexual urge. But that’s probably another blog post.

Let’s get back to yucking it up.

Everyone has told a joke at one time or another. Hopefully the last time you did it wasn’t when you were five years old. There is a feeling you get when you say something funny and suddenly the half-dozen people sitting around the table are all laughing. It’s almost impossible to replicate any other way. For that moment, you created something that changed the way everyone in the room felt.

I’ve had the experience of doing stand-up comedy a few times, and I think everyone should try it at least once. When you stand in front of a room and see 50 or 100 people laughing because of something you said, well, let’s just say it’s comparable to an orgasm. There is nothing quite like it.

P.S. It’s not necessarily as hard as you think. They came there to laugh, there’s a decent chance they’ve been drinking, and if you can put two unexpected things together in a humorous enough way, they’ll laugh their asses off.

How do you do that today? Stand-up, I’m not sure. But with your friends and the people you love, humor is still everywhere. There are entire families whose primary love language seems to be making fun of one another. They tease each other mercilessly, everybody laughs, and somehow it brings them closer together rather than pushing them apart.

In fact, I’ve noticed something interesting over the years: the people you can really tease are usually the people you’re closest to. Teasing can actually be a strange kind of compliment. You’re essentially saying, I know you well enough, I trust you enough, and I believe you know me well enough that we can play with each other without questioning the relationship.

I had this happen recently on a group Zoom call. A woman made fun of a question I asked, and someone else on the call privately messaged me, apparently concerned that I might have been offended. I wrote back that I saw it exactly the opposite way. To me, it was one of the greatest compliments she could have given me. She was announcing, without actually saying it, that she felt close enough to me to tease me.

I think that’s one of the beautiful things about humor that we sometimes overlook. When you’re truly comfortable with someone, you don’t have to measure every word. You can poke at each other. You can exaggerate each other’s quirks. You can say the ridiculous thing that would sound completely inappropriate coming from a stranger, and instead of creating distance, it creates intimacy. The joke itself almost says, We’re close enough that I know you’ll understand what I mean.

Of course, you need a little EQ—emotional intelligence. Don’t make fun of someone’s genuine weakness or something you know they’re deeply insecure about. Interestingly, you can usually tease people much more safely about the things they’re most proud of and confident about. If someone knows they’re brilliant, handsome, successful, athletic or the world’s greatest cook, there’s often plenty of room to have fun with it.

But basically you have two choices. You can become so afraid of offending somebody that you stop telling jokes, stop teasing people, stop taking chances and eventually remove a lot of spontaneous joy from your life. You’ll certainly be safe, but you may also become a bit of a wet blanket—and nobody particularly wants to spend Saturday night with a wet blanket.

Or you can take the risk and have some fun.

Spend one second reading the room. Don’t deliberately hurt somebody. If you realize you’ve crossed a line, apologize and learn from it. Then get back to living.

Because in the end, those are still the choices: live your life with joy and humor, accepting the small risk that occasionally a joke won’t land—or spend your life so worried about getting everything right that you gradually squeeze all the laughter out of it.

I know which one I’m choosing.