The Results of a Three Item Scavenger Hunt

While Comic Relief is never going to be placed in my top 500 Reading List, if I were honest – and I always am – I’d have to admit there are a few points worth remembering.

            The first is humor can be positive. As a person who self-defense mechanism is humor this is welcomed news. Many people don’t understand that telling a joke or “making light” of a situation doesn’t necessarily mean someone doesn’t take something seriously. In a group setting, humor can be used to diffuse a heated situation and bring everyone back to a useful mindset. Humor can also help ease confrontation, in the right situation, so as to make it seem less harsh.

            The second is while humor definitely has many positive attributes, there are some negative ones to watch out for. For instance, humor in the wrong situation can be insincere, inconsiderate, and insensitive. Humor is subjective and as such is highly unpredictable. Reactions to a certain joke vary in different audiences and with individual people depending on their personal backgrounds. For example, blonde jokes may be seen as offensive in a room full of blonde women, but often in mixed company or in an audience without a blonde, the joke may be responded to better.

            The third is wit is better than joke telling. My reasons for liking this one are highly selfish. I believe myself a wit. I enjoy collecting situations in which something hilarious was said or dead in the spur of the moment. Candid humor is the best kind of humor in my book, because it is unstudied and it tells more about the psyche of a person in my way of thinking. So, when Morreall said that he believes people become bored with joke tellers and that they stunt the conversation and kill the flow of ideas, it felt like validation. It’s silly that even validation from a source I don’t much care for can excite me, but, in this case, it did.

            So while every aspect of Morreall’s writing may not be of the highest caliber there are some things to take away from it positively. Some. Not a lot. But some. He has valid points but the way in which he presents them forces his audience to become hostile to his message. As I read other works that are clearly comic or meant to be funny, I witness some of his clearer points in action. But not until the author presenting that comic work wins me over do I recognize the greatness of the idea or even consider that Morreall might have been a little correct. Sorry, Morreall.

Keith: The Initial Meeting

            The small amount of Chinese I’ve learned has finally came in handy! On Thursday this past week, I met with Keith the first time. We met at Union Grounds. When I asked him where he was from and he said China (near Shanghai), I got very excited. I have been practicing some Chinese phrases over the last year as well as learning from one of my best friends as much about the culture as I could. My hope in sharing some of this: to make him more comfortable with me and make myself more relatable to him.

            I like to think it helped spark our friendship! Though some of the phrases were weird to just spout off – I don’t care! It bridged the culture gap just that I could say something! He asked how I learned my small amount of Chinese and I told him about my friend. He asked me her name. I gave it both in English and in Chinese, and I think it shocked him. However, it resulted in his telling me his Chinese name. As a reward for my excellent pronunciation, he asked me to call him his Chinese name. (Rather he said, “You say it better than other Americans. You can call me Yangyi.”)

            After the initial awkwardness we started talking and talked for an hour with minimal uncomfortable pauses where both of us tried to look anywhere but each other as we scrambled for a new topic that we might be able to talk about. In short, it went well. We talked about friends, music, sports, China, and movies. At one point we actually talked about each other’s dating life, but we both were able to find a new topic quickly enough for that not to have time to get awkward.

            Because I have had other friends in the IEP and at this part of the semester some of their English wasn’t very good at all, I wasn’t expecting much. Keith exceeded all of my expectations by far. Though he had some trouble expressing ideas and the conversation was mostly intuitive, we were really able to discuss a wide variety of things. There was about 3 times that I would say something like, “Did you see the petting zoo on Tuesday?” and he would say, “I like zoos and animals. Did you see they had a zoo out in the grass?” When this happened I just acted as if the topic was originating from him, acted excited, and asked him if he went to it. He excitedly showed me pictures of him at the petting zoo in the Commons.

           

            Smart phones are useful tools. I asked if he like rollercoasters. He wasn’t sure what I was talking about. Google Images saved the day! I pulled up pictures of Six Flags and he started bubbling with desire to tell me so many things. From what I gather, there is a theme park close to him home.


            At the end, we walked out together and through the Commons. It all ended with a picture and discussion about meeting Tuesday. Can't wait!

Story of My Life

            I was a bit of a paranoid little kid. I was always fretting about the kidnappings I had heard about on TV. I worried constantly about being kidnapped and what would happen if I was. I’d cry and cry to my mother asking, what if I was kidnapped? She replied, “They’d give you back,” and stopped letting me watch the news.

            “They’d give you back.” Honestly, a statement like that only adds more questions to the fire. I mean, why didn’t they just give back all the other kids, too? I just couldn’t understand.

            Then came the day that I learned I talked a lot. Not just a higher than average amount, but a ton. That’s roughly two-thousand pounds of words that I would talk per conversation, per story, per moment. I understood. The kidnappers would never be able to shut me up. No gags, tape, or threats could quiet me! I had discovered my best defense! The gift of gab!

            Apparently O. Henry can relate. Or at least he can imagine stories that make me feel like he can relate. It doesn’t really matter which – I still enjoyed the story. O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief” was hilariously relatable. There really weren’t any quips or small tastes of humor throughout, just the one superb punch line. It wasn’t his verbal gymnastics that wowed and amazed me (because there weren’t much – just story-telling, plain and dry). It wasn’t the details into the kidnappers’ personal lives that fully explained why they did what they did (because there weren’t much – except the knowledge that they had some money and needed more). It wasn’t the clever dialogue that kept me thinking, “Why can’t comebacks like that be thought of in real life?” (because there weren’t really any – no witty repartees or vocal sparring back and forth). It was his patience in waiting until the end when the reader was primed and ready for the kidnappers to receive the $2000 from a frantic parent whose only care is the safety of his child. But alas, what actually occurred did not line up with any of our expectations. The dad says, “You can pay me to take him back,” and it actually works because the kid drove them so crazy.

            O. Henry, or as I like to think of him: O, Henry. Yes, O, Henry, you have fooled us again. Taken our expectations and thrown them to the wind. Taken the textbook examples of humor we read about in days gone recently by and introduced them in actual writing. Taken our compassion for this poor kidnapped child and family, and created a cognitive shift to a new understanding. O, Henry, how did you do it? Simply, patiently, and perfectly.

Thank you, Henry. Or may I call you “O”?