What's So Funny?

​What’s so funny? Some days, it seems, nothing. With disastrous fires, floods, and winds; political discord; violence spawned from hatred; and the overall uncertainty of life in 2025 and beyond, what could there possibly be to laugh about? Do we even have the right to laugh when others are suffering?

​Spiritual guides and mental health professionals encourage us to acknowledge gratitude daily—to make it a habit by keeping a gratitude journal. But what about making humor a habit?

​I’ve been thinking about this lately after re-reading a journal I kept in 1970. I was twenty-one, newly married to my first husband, living in Northern California amidst redwood forests and agate-strewn beaches, taking college classes, and reading, reading, reading. So much to explore and learn about. Yet my seemingly idyllic life had its challenges and heartbreaks. My mother’s health was rapidly declining; my father was caring for her at home on top of working full-time at his medical practice. And I was two-thousand miles away from them. All of that against a backdrop of war in Southeast Asia and anti-war protests around the U.S.

​While taking all these things seriously, my twenty-one-year-old self always managed to find something to wryly remark upon as I recounted everyday events, One day it was the revelation that the ugly, hairy, gnarled stems poking up at forest’s edge were actually unfurling ferns sporting lacy fronds. Who knew? 

​Another day, it was my hippie-dippy English prof who wore sandals and a half-buttoned shirt and conferred with students in his garret-like office, where he sat on a futon in the dark beneath a giant picture of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (to whom he bore a striking—and humorous—resemblance).

​I even poked fun at myself. After talking a hairdresser into giving me a super-short haircut with a super-curly perm on top (“Yes, I know it’s unusual. Yes, I really do want you to do that to my hair.”), I drew a cartoony sketch of the haircut and noted “It’s a lot of laughs.”

​As I read that journal, I vowed to revive my youthful habit of finding spots of humor in daily life, no matter how un-funny life sometimes seems.

​I’m not alone in my quest for a little lightness. The January/February issue of Poets & Writers magazine devoted its monthly Literary MagNet column to Tiffany Midge, who makes a practice of putting a humorous spin on everything she writes. “Humor writing is a kind of self-imposed apprenticeship I’ve designed for myself: How can I incorporate humor into poetry? Fiction? An essay?” she says. A citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, she finds an added challenge in writing about Native issues and topics in a way that people outside the culture will find accessible and funny. Her recent essay collection, The Dreamcatcher in the Wry (Bison Books, 2024), offers a taste of her humor. Other pieces have found a home in the satire website Belladonna, among other platforms and journals.

​Finally, there’s this from historian Heather Cox Richardson, who offered a bit of advice near the end of a serious analysis of current events: “Do not give up your joy. Do not give up your sense of humor.”

​So how am I doing with my daily humor vow? Well . . . some days better than others. But I’m still convinced it’s a worthwhile pursuit. What about you?