Looking back on my own life, I have become aware of a marked progression in my sense of humor. I began humbly, as a child with less than what was necessary to induce laughter in others, except by accident. At the most, I could expect blank stares, which mystified me. Not always did was my joke-telling experience so awkward; I do exaggerate somewhat, but as I grew up, I became increasingly and regretfully aware that I was not what you’d call a “funny kid.”

Now I’m 24. In less than a week, I’ll be done with college, and I have learned a lot in what it takes to land a joke. Even if I don’t always make others laugh, I can usually give myself something to chuckle about. My sense of humor, however, has been described in such terms as “unusual” and “stupid” and even “crazy.” While I will let you judge this for yourself by the end of this essay, this is the opportune time to take a few moments now to trace back with you my own sense of humor and the developments that I’ve made since I was a boy.

In my youth (not that I’m “old” now), there was basically one concept that consistently appealed to my underdeveloped rationale for laughing. This concerned sounds and words. The “sounds-and-words” category included such things as tone of voice and words that didn’t seem to go with each other (such as swear words, for some inexplicable reason), as well as, occasionally, words that betrayed the speakers’ feelings—especially an inappropriate amount of anger.

There are two events that nicely fit into the “sounds-and-words” category. Both took place one day when my family and I were returning home from our vacation in Potato Creek, Indiana. The first one happened while my mom was filming our reactions to our “surprise vacation,” and when it was my turn, I “shouted” something like, “I’ll never forget this place!” Truly, it was not funny at all, but at the time I thought my tone of voice sounded funny for some reason.

The second event, however, was a little better. My sister Joy was a baby back then, and she sat in a car seat with my sister Kristin on her right side and me on her left. Something happened on the way back from Indiana that morning, and Joy started crying…and kept crying…and crying… and would not stop for some reason. She wouldn’t drink her bottle. She wouldn’t accept her pacifier. The only antidote to her spontaneous sorrow right then was a little toy apple, which had a face painted on it and made a strange noise when shaken. That day, I shook the crap out of that toy—and it was working—but by the time we were within an hour from our house, my poor dad couldn’t take it anymore.

“Russ!” he screamed from the driver’s side, “Put that stupid apple down and find some other way to keep Joy quiet!”

For some reason the word “stupid” in his sentence cracked me up. Probably because I was trying to figure out why that “stupid” noise stopped my baby sister from crying. Probably because of the irony that the “stupid apple” was calming down my sister while greatly upsetting my dad (although back then, I wouldn’t have thought of it that way). Whatever it really was, it’s stayed in my head to this day (and still makes me laugh, sometimes).

Besides my pitiful attempt to amuse myself with my tone of voice, I have also turned to cartoons for funny-sounding voices. Looney Tunes are wonderful in this category of goofy-sounding voices—especially with their unintelligent characters. One cartoon that I remember had this “unintelligent character” as a dog that was trying to catch Bugs Bunny. Every time Bugs Bunny ran away, the dog would start running too—and then a “CRASH!” would be heard. Then the screen would follow the direction of the dog till he was found, in a daze, next to a tree that was completely demolished, as with a lightning bolt. The dog would always have stars spinning around its head and then say something like, “Oops… ‘nother tree!” And that would happen four or five times within one cartoon!

Apart from television, though, other venues of strange sound also presented themselves to me on a regular basis. For instance, I was still a kid when I discovered the fun of tape-recording my voice to make all sorts of random “skits.” These skits had interesting effects on my academic performance. While the skits greatly increased my very limited improvisational skills, they also greatly decreased my homework output and studying time. Back then I could make a skit about anything, be it “The Importance of Smiling,” random “Fight” skits between two or more “characters” (although I was the only one making these skits), or even a “Tree-Climbing Race” (that one still makes me chuckle). As for the sounds and words, I discovered that switching the dubbing speed to high while recording made the resulting sound very low. Having discovered this accidentally, I thought it was about the funniest thing ever, and in almost every skit after that, I incorporated a least one character with a “super-low” tone of voice.

Another quirk about my sense of humor for a while was my insistence on laughing, no matter what. I often found myself in a group of people who’d be telling jokes and laughing at them, and since I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t understand the humor, I’d laugh too. More people caught on than didn’t, I think, so I often ended up making a fool of myself. Or else I’d try to make a joke of my own to go along with the jokes already being told, and I’d usually fail. I just didn’t understand how to be funny. My mom, sometimes nearby for these embarrassing moments of mine, begged me to stop trying to be funny and just listen to the other jokes. For a while, I did.

And then, I met people that finally taught me how to be “punny.” It took a very long time, though, and when I first met them, talking with them was little better than stepping through a minefield of incomprehensible puns. Since I was so inexperienced with the entire concept of puns back then, there were many casualties. For example, with my friend Dan, the word “sometimes” was one of those mines that I frequently stepped on. Most people, I think, would have difficulty understanding how this could be a punny word, too. For Dan, “sometimes” sounds like the “Sun Times,” newspaper, and so he would often say, “Oh, so you do read the paper!” I don’t know which was worse back then: the pun itself or the fact that I consistently fell for it, time and time again. Another punny word, slightly more clever than “sometimes/Sun Times,” was the word “maybe.” Dan would respond with “June bug,” because the “may” went with “June,” and a “bee” is a kind of “bug.” Sadly, it doesn’t make sense. Even more sadly, however, is the fact that it is at least somewhat logical. I didn’t think so back then, however; neither did Andy, a friend of both Dan’s and mine.

After about two or three years of consistently falling prey to these and many other stupid puns, I finally was able to grasp that the key lay in word associations, and now, I can make better puns than they do—I’m the one who lays the mines for them to step on! For instance, Andy, a fellow victim of those puns, has problems remembering things that have happened to him. This had gotten so bad that one time Joe, a third friend of mine, once cried out, “Andy, your memory is like Swiss cheese—‘cuz it’s so full of holes!” Two days later, Dan and Andy and Joe and I were in Dan’s car, and Joe was reminding Andy of a story that had happened to both of them. Andy, not surprisingly to the rest of us, didn’t remember the story at all, and I smirked and blurted out, “Dang! We’ve got more Swiss cheese here than your average American deli!” That actually remains one of our all-time favorite quotes.

Also critical in my development of humor have been comedic movies such as Spy Hard and the TV show The Simpsons. These are very funny because, at times, they are very illogical and very satirical. I have learned many elements of comedy from Homer Simpson’s carelessness or Leslie Nielsen’s stupid antics, such as diving off the back of a boat and suddenly landing on a lower deck of the same boat. Also, driving a bus with no brakes and carrying frightened passengers, in and of itself, is not funny, but when the bus suddenly hits a huge bump in the road and is going so fast that in the next shot you see the bus in the air in front of a full moon, parodizing a screenshot from E.T., then that is funny, because it’s not something that happens in everyday life; it’s just random. So another thing I have learned that is funny is the unexpected.

And now, having taken these things and others to heart, I have become able to predict some things that will make people laugh. I thrive on creativity rather than clichés, and so when I tell a joke now, I often seek out the thing that my audience will be expecting the least. This is probably why many people tend to see me as “crazy,” but for me this view has become, more or less, a strong indicator that my sense of humor has indeed developed…perhaps ahead of its time. And I say to those people, “If you think I’m ‘crazy’ now, then you should have seen me back when I didn’t know how to tell a joke! That was downright unbelievable!”

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