What Impact Is Possible When We Use Ourselves As The Gag?

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My grandfather was a storyteller. Whenever he launched into a story at the big family dinner table, everyone listened because, one, he was beloved, and two, he was a gifted speaker. Part of his signature style was to drop a little humor into his stories when there was an opening for it. He was a calm person, wise, and not demonstrative when speaking, but he was an organized thinker and speaker, so you eagerly followed his tales.

For example, the one about his apple trees.

My grandfather had three piddly apple trees in his yard which he tended to, hoping to gain a small harvest out of them. He knew little about growing apples, so he decided to attend a meeting of a fruit tree farmers association to learn what he could. He sat at the meeting and listened, picking up bits and morsels of information.

At one point, he raised his hand to ask about an issue he was dealing with at his home apple farm. After he posed his question, one of the farmers asked for clarification. “Do you mean you have three acres of trees? Or three hundred acres?” This was a legit question, so my grandfather clarified.

“Oh no. I have three trees,” he said. There was a ripple through the room, some sidelong glances. This was where my grandfather chuckled in his telling of the story to us, at which point we let loose our typical cockamamie family cackle riot.

The point of the story, of course, was my grandfather was an apple farmer of great deficiency. And, more importantly, wasn’t that funny? If you understood that jumping into the deep end in a clown suit rather than a Speedo is a glory moment in our beautifully imperfect human journey, then you’d think it was very funny.

And that’s humor in a nutshell. Or at least useful humor.

In humor we want to punch up — to make the power or privilege structure the subject of our gags. Why? Because that’s comedy. Punching down, despite what some folks will say — and I’ve been reading about it lately — is at worst mean, and at best boring. Some folks will mistake a joke they think punches down for one that is in truth punching up. My grandfather’s story is a perfect example.

The joke there is not that my grandfather was a silly fool to show up at a professional farming meeting. Deep down, the joke is at the expense of our tendency sometimes to think we must be an expert before we start to learn. The laughter at the table reflected that we all understood we’re beginners at something and we might take risks that make us look foolish, and this is funny.

But it’s only funny because it plays against the backdrop that we require ourselves to be perfect. That’s the joke. We’re not machines, we’re not all-knowing, we’re not infallible. We’re farmers of three-apple-tree farms.

When folks use themselves as the gag in their stories, as long as they’re punching up at something — overly high expectations, our thirst for predictability in an unpredictable world, bad luck, living on this tough planet— then I get to hear yet one more time we’re all human and we’re doing okay. I can always stand to hear that one more time.

When we make good-hearted light of ourselves, we display self-acceptance. If we truly find amusement in our foibles, then we’re acknowledging our position in the world — we’re not above it, we’re of it. When this happens, we’ve opened the bejeweled door to possibility and closed the patched-up, creaky door on self-judgment. We’re punching up on the power that our strict expectations for ourselves hold over us. When we have a little giggle over this, that’s a love moment.

This past Thanksgiving holiday here in the U.S., my family drove up to be with my extended family in New Jersey. As expected, there was a whirl of activity and conversation. At one point, my nephew pulled me aside to show me the new purchase he made with some of his recently earned cash that was burning a hole in his pocket.

It was a race car steering wheel unit with a separate floor unit that featured gas, brake, and clutch pedals. These two units were synced to a big-screen TV so you could drive a simulated race car around a racetrack on the screen. It looked cool to me, so I signed up to be a guinea pig with his new toy. Soon, we had my two sons and my mom recruited down to the basement to show off our prowess as race car drivers. I went first.

Have you ever seen someone wing a basketball inside a store that sells fine china? That was my car as I frantically attempted to drive it one pitiful time around the track. While I didn’t make it one loop, I made up for it with miles of track zigzagging, backward skidding, racing on the grass to the side of the track, not to mention wall smacks, and just plain old spin-outs to dead stops.

Prowess wasn’t the word my audience used for my skillz. It was hard to hear anything above the laughter and constant, “You’re over-steering!”

My mom who recently turned eighty and must pace herself now when it comes to physical activity breezed around the track without yelling once, “How the heck am I supposed to do this??!!”

I don’t even want to mention how my kids did.

Yet, when I type this, nothing but glee comes over me. I was a disaster at simulated race car driving. Would I do it again? I don’t have to. I relive this comedy in my mind at will, just to liven up my day.

You could ask, “But, who really cares whether they’re good or bad at simulated race car driving?”

And I’d answer, “Exactly. So why do we care that we’re a fledgling, a learner, someone seeking knowledge and experience, a clown, or our current selves?”

Aren’t they all the same thing?

There are dual story circles going on out there. One circle flows with rigid tales of failure, shortcomings, self-bashing, magical thinking, and dismissal. Folks sit there on stools and listen, wishing they could give themselves a little more grace, but the stories are too compelling for that, terrifying in fact.

The other story circle is a hoot. The tellers laugh, the listeners laugh, folks mill about and feel comfortable with each other. They walk away with remnant giggles, eager to get home, hang their race car keys on a hook, and harvest some apples.

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Hope you're well, friends.