So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It’s as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.
Mark Twain, “A Humorist’s Confession,” The New York Times, November 26, 1905
Age to me means nothing. I can’t get old; I’m working. I was old when I was twenty-one and out of work. As long as you’re working, you stay young. When I’m in front of an audience, all that love and vitality sweeps over me and I forget my age.
George Burns
I recently posted what would be generously described as a ‘quip’ on a friend’s Facebook page, only to receive a prompt scolding from someone I barely remember (let’s call her Bertha – not her real name) for having the audacity to think the way my post suggested. My friend had posted pictures of people he’d encountered at our 50th high school reunion. My quip was about being old: questioning why my friend was hanging around with old folks – i.e., those of our certain age – when he could be hanging out with someone his own age. My friend has taught college classes most of his life, and he has a warped sense of humor and doesn’t act his age. Hence, the quip was intended as gentle fun with someone who would appreciate its irony.
Admittedly, my quip wasn’t the stuff of high humor and perhaps was simply unamusing when judged on a standalone basis. I understand my own limitations as a humorist, so I promise to stick to my day job. After all, I’ve only recently discovered that being retired requires full-time effort.
Bertha’s reaction was instructive, for she posted, with evident shortness, that we were all the same age. The only thing her comment lacked in asperity was an exclamation mark at its end! In short, she failed to recognize my quip as an attempt at humor. I suspect, given what little I know about her, that she wouldn’t have recognized a good joke if I’d quoted Henny Youngman, instead. For example, she might have missed the point of this, choosing to comment instead upon Grandmother’s lack of hygienic principles.
My grandmother is over 80 and still doesn’t need glasses. She drinks right out of the bottle.
Henny Youngman
But I digress, for this is not a piece about Henny Youngman or any other comedian you care to name. This is a piece, instead, about the importance of a sense of humor in life, no matter what success one might have in telling jokes.
Somewhere during mid-career as an attorney, I began to notice that my most successful clients and referral sources all had a vigorous sense of humor in their approach to life and business. And the most successful of all were those that had the ability to laugh with abandon at their own foibles and failures. I have often wondered why that was, and have come to believe there are two principal reasons.
The first is related to their personalities. Successful people routinely take risks. Risk taking is necessary to turn a profit, since profits are nothing more than the marginal gains earned upon risks assumed and undertaken. In other words, one must assume risk if one is to be successful, and this axiom holds true regardless of the field of endeavor in which the successful person is engaged.
I see humor as another form of risk taking, and, if I am correct in this analysis, it stands to reason that the more successful someone is, the greater the sense of humor he or she is likely to possess. And I will stipulate that there are, no doubt, exceptions to this rule. I am as certain as I can be that there are prominent examples of successful businessmen who lacked anything vaguely resembling a sense of humor, and if I am correct many of them sat for photographic portraits in the late 1800’s – no one in any of the portraits I’ve seen from that era ever seemed to mug for the camera. In their defense, perhaps mugging for the camera hadn’t yet been invented. After all, the camera was still a new fangled device at the time.
That an attempt at humor is the taking of a risk seems obvious to me. In making my quip about age on my friend’s Facebook page, I had to think first about whether I cared that other mutual friends our age might be sensitive about getting old and whether I might, accordingly, offend someone. I decided I didn’t care about that risk – not because I had a wish to offend anyone else, but because my personality is such that if someone is offended by something I do, I figure it’s their problem and not mine. The person to whom I must be true is me, not them. While I have no wish to offend, if my motive in making any remark is not to offend but to have fun, someone who takes things in such a way as to be offended hasn’t my sympathy. Living one’s life in a state of perpetual gloom isn’t for me, isn’t the source of any joy – despite the humor of Al Capp’s Joe Jtbfsplk.
Jokes can fall flat in the same way a business venture can fail, and the successful person learns from his or her business failures as well as from his or her failed attempts at humor. And the learning comes from having tried and failed, from having accepted the sort of challenge that might affect posterity, from having taken a risk in spite of its apparent chances of success in the offing.
The second reason most successful people seem to possess a sense of humor is their ability to stay young in outlook. Let’s face it, getting old isn’t for sissies as the common lament states. I have often opined that the aches and pains associated with getting older are God’s way of reminding us of portions of our anatomy of whose existence we have taken for granted or seem to have forgotten. If you give in to these aches and pains, life becomes dismal at best, for why would anyone in their right mind want to contemplate having to endure them for the remainder of whatever time is left to them?
My belief is that I – indeed, anyone – can stay as mentally young as I want for as long as I want, for as long as the time allotted to me, notwithstanding the associated aches and pains of true physical age. For mental age is, at some basic level, merely a matter of viewpoint. I truly believe that I acted older at age 25 than I do now at age 68, and in so saying I am not arguing that my life is going backwards but recognizing that I had far more reasons then to be serious than I now have in retirement.
Successful people are young in outlook. How else can one explain a former client of mine who, at my age, is undertaking the risk of a new business venture requiring a significant capital investment? He didn’t sigh and pass upon the opportunity because he wanted to spend his declining years swaddled and cosseted. He recognized the opportunity as an intriguing challenge and set out to decipher the riddles that stand in the way of its success. And he is currently consulting with me about the possibility of yet another, wholly unrelated, investment opportunity, while still in the thrall of getting the first venture off the ground. His is an energy I appreciate and admire, especially when his tales of his business trials are accompanied by the crystalline purity of his laughter.
The funniest comment ever made to me about getting older came from my mother. She was in her late eighties and suffering from Parkinson’s Disease when she told it to me. “When I look in the mirror now each morning,” she said, “I have to ask myself: Who is that old broad, anyway?” Like all great humor, her statement recognized a truth, admitted to a reality. For who among us doesn’t have a mental image fixed somewhere in their mid-twenties? For who among us of a certain age isn’t startled by our outward appearance, when inside we are as young as we wish to be?
And Bertha? Well, I resisted the impulse to bite back on Facebook and chose, instead, to allow her scolding to stand without rebuttal. For while we may be the same physical age, I take delight in my immaturity of view, in my sense of humor. For while I am proud to be a juvenile at my age, I have no reason to offend: I learned long ago to forego some of the aspects that are juvenile trademarks; to act my age while employing only the best attributes of theirs; to treat others as nicely as I can while remaining true to my own philosophy
After all, I am the one who has to like the person in the mirror – regardless of his outward appearance.
