Trekkychick

I have a longstanding reputation among my friends. No, I’m not talking about the way I dissect my food while I eat it, nor my phobia of eating red meat and riding on an airplane (or the worst, eating red meat WHILE on an airplane). No, I am most infamous for my inability to tell a joke.

This is not to say I’m not funny. In fact, most of my friends would consider me to be one of the most amusing people they know. But most of the time this is due to accidental humor. That is, I believe what I say to be of incredible importance, but they consider it to be ridiculously amusing. Those times I go for intentional humor and try to properly deliver a punchline, I’m met with, at best, averted eyes, and at worst, loud booing from the crowd. And these are my friends. I don’t dare attempt a joke in front of strangers. Not since that unfortunate incident on the bus.

The primary culprit for my lack of success at joke telling is the fact that I already know the punchline, and I already love it. Thus I am unable to hold my laughter until I get to the punchline. The whole joke experience is virtually destroyed by my incessant giggling as I envision the fantastic punchline that I will inevitably botch.

My hysterical laughter increases my audience’s expectations for the joke. After all, if I find the joke THIS comical, it must be the greatest joke ever told. The audience is therefore disproportionately devastated by the mediocre punchline. And this after suffering through the laborious telling of the joke marked by fits of laughter from me.

Thankfully, after years of friendship, my friends have appropriately lowered their expectations to the point that as soon as I utter, “Ooh, I have a new joke, and this one’s GOOD!” they already know that it won’t be.

I work with students who have disabilities, and I know the importance of modifying assignments that are too difficult so that the students can still experience success at their level of learning and understanding. Applying this technique to my life, I acknowledge that it could be said that I have a joke-telling disability (and for those who don’t consider that a true disability, consult my friends), and I need to modify my joke-telling so that I experience success. And while my closest friends insist that I will experience the most success by simply never telling a joke again, ever, I know that excluding me entirely from participation in the joke-telling culture is not an appropriate modification for someone with special (joke-telling) needs.

Therefore I have developed and am in the process of implementing two modifications for joke-telling for myself and those who are similarly afflicted with impairments in properly delivering jokes. The first is to accept and embrace the contexts in which we are considered most humorous. That is, those times when I’m actually attempting to be serious. Second, identify a joke-telling success, and capitalize on it. For me, these are laffy taffy jokes. They tend to be so bad that they elicit a laugh from even the most skeptic audience members. (Generally, they are laughing at how bad the laffy taffy joke is, but a laugh is a laugh.) Moreover, these jokes are so short that I have experienced a 74% success rate at making it through the entire joke without bursting into laughter when I increase my rate of speech by approximately seventeen syllables per minute. I experience a 97% success rate when I tell these jokes to my students who are under the age of eleven. I experience a 100% success rate when I tell my students that they can eat the laffy taffy if they laugh at my joke.

The moral of this blog, if you were looking for one, is that anybody can be funny, but it’s not funny to be anybody.

Just kidding. Don’t ever look for a moral in my blogs. Not even the one entitled “This Blog Has a Moral!” because you know I’m just messing with you.

–Troi out