Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Sense of Humor")

July 7—13, 2024 | THIS WEEK: “Sense of Humor”

Opening Line of the Week

These words are not precisely about this week’s theme, but they’re a perfect example of how a sense of humor can help one squarely face the most difficult of subjects—awaiting one’s imminent death during hospice care.

Buchwald didn’t exactly write the book either, he dictated it. In the last year of his life, while sitting in a comfortable chair in his hospice room, he recorded his thoughts on a tape recorder and sent them off to be typed by his secretary. When the book was published, it was the last of his thirty books.

After his death, Buchwald continued to demonstrate his trademark sense of humor. On January 17, 2007, the day after he died at age 81 from kidney failure, the New York Times website posted a video obituary which began with Buchwald saying, “Hi. I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

On July 13, 1947, this woman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After attending Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pa. (where a classmate was future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), she lived for a time in a Philadelphia hippie commune before moving to Manhattan to pursue her dream of a journalism career.

It took a few years to find her footing, but during the 1980s and 90s, she began writing some of the “hippest” columns of the era for such publications as The Village Voice, Vogue, New York magazine, and Playboy. Writer and comedian Emily Prater wrote of her:

“She had the soul of Janis Joplin in the voice of Hedda Hopper. She was a voice for liberation with manners, freedom without regret, and the blues with a grain of salt.”

Beginning with Sex Tips for Girls in 1983, she wrote seven popular books aimed at modern women (and one play, A Girl’s Guide to Chaos, in 1986). She also worked as a screenwriter for the television sitcoms “Dead John” and “Kate and Allie.” I didn’t discover her work until the 1990s, but she soon became one of my favorite writers. She also crafted four of the best book titles in publishing history: 

• If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? (1991)

• Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Good-Bye (1993)

• If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too? (1995)

• When Your Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’ll Be Me! (1996)

In 2018, I was greatly saddened to learn that this week’s Mystery Woman had died of “complications from dementia.” Only seventy years old at her death, she’d been diagnosed a year earlier, and her final year was spent in an assisted-living facility in Los Angeles. In a Washington Post obituary, Harrison Smith wrote:

“In her books and columns, [she] wrote about bad boys, bad dates, bad sex and bad birth control, with the occasional reminiscence of blissed-out pleasure thrown in. ‘God protects drunks, infants, and feisty girls,’ she once observed, and in a tumultuous, three-decade writing career, she was feistier than most.”

In Sex Tips for Girls (1983), she wrote: 

Who is this person? (Answer below)

Do You Have a Good Sense of Humor?

The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) defines a sense of humor as “The ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd.” The English word humour derives from the Latin humor, meaning “moist,” and was originally used to refer to four bodily fluids that were believed to determine a person’s temperament. We won’t explore the names—or the nature—of those fluids here, but what they represented continue to show up in words we use today: sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric. According to the AHD editors:

“In the 1600s, humour (now spelled humor in the United States) at last came to mean the quality that makes something amusing or laughable, as well as the ability to amuse others and to appreciate those things that are amusing—that is, a sense of humor.”

Before you attempt to answer the question about whether or not you possess a good sense of humor, let me offer a word of caution. It is now pretty well accepted that even people who are humorless believe they have a good sense of humor. This intriguing form of self-deception has been noted by many people over the years, and the first I recall it being described was in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920):

“There are two insults which no human being will endure: the assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.”

Since then, many others have echoed the sentiment.

So, why is it that people bristle at the suggestion that they have no sense of humor? There are a bunch of reasons, I think, but they boil down to two. First, and probably most obvious, a good sense of humor is an exceptionally desirable trait. In survey after survey, it’s been cited as one of the most sought-after qualities in a good friend, romantic partner, or spouse. Given this, if you’re told that you don’t have a good sense of humor, it’s almost as if you’re being told that you’re both personally deficient and interpersonally inadequate.

The second, and perhaps even more important reason has to do with the critical role that a sense of humor plays in helping people cope with the problems of human existence. In this week’s Opening Line feature, you saw a perfect example from Art Buchwald. In writing his final book, Buchwald demonstrated something that psychologists have long believed—people with a good sense of humor are especially skilled at coping with adversity. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point nicely when he wrote in a 1948 journal entry:

“Humor is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.”

So, to return to the question posed earlier, if someone says you lack a sense of humor, it can be emotionally unsettling as well as threatening to your self-esteem. It’s tantamount to saying that you lack emotional maturity and psychological resiliency.

We’ll return to both of these themes in a moment, but before we do, let me mention one more thing. In almost every article or essay I’ve ever read on the subject, a sense of humor is described as a positive individual trait. And while I tend to agree, I believe this is an oversimplification. Since a sense of humor is carried out in an interpersonal context, we must recognize that two separate senses of humor are at work in a relationship—and the key question becomes: are they compatible or not?

In the case of Edith Wharton and Henry James, there was a great compatibility. In her 1934 memoir A Backward Glance, Wharton wrote that James was “perhaps the most intimate friend I ever had.” She added:

It’s almost impossible for me to imagine a better description of what results when people have a shared sense of humor. But what can we expect when two people in a relationship aren’t so fortunate? What happens when one person looks at a partner’s sense of humor and views it as immature, annoying, irritating, or worse? I saw such a thing happen with a young couple I knew many years ago.

On the surface, Stan and Sarah (not their real names) seemed like a perfect couple—physically attractive, athletically oriented, serious Red Sox fans, and both rising professionals in the medical field. A few years after moving out of the neighborhood, I ran into Stan at a local mall, and he told me that he and Sarah were in the process of getting a divorce. When I asked what happened, he said, “I know this sounds unusual, but she just didn’t get my sense of humor.” He was in a hurry, so I didn’t get much further information.

A month later, I ran into Sarah at the same mall and, in response to my question about what happened, she said, “In a nutshell, I got tired of him inflicting his humor on me.” When I asked why she’d chosen the unusual word inflicting, she said that their two senses of humor clashed so sharply that it felt like the most accurate description of how things felt to her.

She went on to explain that she favored cerebral humor that featured wit and wordplay and clever turns of phrase, as in the works of such authors as P. G. Wodehouse and G. K. Chesterton. By contrast, she described Stan as a “glad-handing jokester” who couldn’t stop himself from telling “silly and nonsensical jokes” to everyone he met, including guests at their home. In addition to finding his humor “grating,” she believed it also revealed an underlying “fear of intimacy” that kept people at bay. She concluded by saying that she decided to end the marriage before they brought any children into the world.

Not long after our conversation ended, I stumbled upon a little-known literary passage that memorably summed up Stan and Sarah’s situation:

As I reflected on my conversation with Sarah, I also realized that I had occasionally seen my own sense of humor backfire on me. I won’t go into the details here, but it generally happened when I was trying to be clever or witty—and failed. The English historian Geoffrey Bocca captured the essence of the problem when he wrote in The Woman Who Would Be Queen (1954):

“Wit is a treacherous dart. It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible to stab oneself in one’s own back."

Having taken this brief look at the potential downside of humor, let me bring my remarks to a close this week by returning to the larger point I made earlier—a good sense of humor goes to the heart of how to survive in a world that is filled with problems, troubles, and other forms of adversity. 

Of all groups, I think comedians understand this best. Robin Williams once said that “Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.” Over the years, I’ve never known a comedian or humorist who hasn’t said something similar, including Sammy Davis, Jr. The target of virulent racial prejudice his entire life, Davis found countless ways to transmute the darkest aspects of his life into some of his brightest comedic moments. Perhaps my favorite was when he once said: 

“Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.”

To conclude, as you confront whatever life has in store for you, a good sense of humor may be the most effective weapon at your disposal. So this week, think about how helpful your own sense of humor has been in your life. Before doing anything, though, take a few moments to peruse this week’s compilation of quotations: 

• Humor is a social lubricant that helps us get over some of the bad spots. — Steve Allen

• Even though it seems foolish and silly and crazy, comedy has the most to say about the human condition. Because if you can laugh, you can get by. You can survive when things are bad when you have a sense of humor. — Mel Brooks

• A sense of humor in marriage acts as a lightning rod on a building: grounds the sparks from the air. — Marcelene Cox

• Certainly if there is any worldly talent worth cultivating, it’s a sense of humor. To possess a cheerful outlook may be the greatest gift of the gods, the distant second best being a taste for irony. — Michael Dirda

• Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. — Christopher Morley

• Humor is hope’s companion in arms. It is not brash, it is not cheap, it is not heartless. Among other things I think humor is a shield, a weapon, a survival kit. — Ogden Nash

• A sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised. — Tom Robbins

• Humor is a universal solvent against the abrasive elements of life. — Alan K. Simpson

• Humor is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them. — Simon Wiesenthal

• The man with the real sense of humor is the man who can put himself in the spectator’s place and laugh at his own misfortunes. — Bert Williams

For source information on these quotations, and many others on the topic of SENSE OF HUMOR, go here.

Cartoon of The Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Cynthia Heimel (1947-2018)  

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Insight.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note