Book an on-line appointment with my doctors and you get a finish time as well as a start time. I had ten minutes. Walking over I concentrated on being concise.She watched attentively, contributed detail that showed she'd been listening, did tests, reached her conclusion. But this isn't about medical matters. It's about my very being.
All done, I looked at my watch. I'd met the ten-minute deadline. Bumblingly, comically, I said I'd worried but was happy now, I hadn't wasted her time. It was unexpected but that's what I intended. She laughed. An extremely attractive woman, laughing became her.
In fact her gender was incidental, she could have been one of the male doctors. What was familiar was that in a socio/professional encounter I had sought to joke. More than that, I had sought to make her laugh.
That distinction is important. Anyone can tell a joke, most shouldn't. Ensuring laughter - I confess unashamedly, I'm good at it - demands technique. By far the best way is first to lull: to start out dully, banal, even a cliché, then snap out something outrageous in the last three or four words. It's the unexpectedness that does it. Involuntary laughter, which is easy to identify, gives you the proof.
But why do I do it? I'm not sure. Most people, but not all, enjoy laughing. Does their laughter make me more lovable? If so there's a darker side. Causing people to laugh is a way of controlling them. Ironically, with my rare failures, confusion is the most likely reaction and that too is a form of control.
I do it all the time. Did it in professional interviews where it is perhaps more explicable. Previous laughers laugh yet again. I love doing it, love the skill. But is it normal?
I think it's more than a skill, it's a gift and if you want to add control to it, so what.
ReplyDeleteAnd what on earth has it got to do with being normal? What would you of all people want to get out of being normal?
Just a snippet of info: Medical science abhors the term normal. You may hear stuff like, your cholesterol is normal or your blood pressure is normal. But the proper term is "within the reference range", i.e. under that Gaussian curve where most people are huddled some or most of the time. But what would the world be without the outliers, the idiopathics, the unexplained ones. It would not exist.
Face down on an operating table, but still only lightly sedated, I asked the two or three nurse/assistants around me a question about the proctologist, just as he arrived to join them and proceed. "Did you know that Dr. Zeigler is an amateur astronomer"? They murmured curiously so I went ahead: "He's always trying to get a closer look at Uranus". Dr. Zeigler, at least as old as I was at the time (and therefore possibly the only person standing who grew up with the pre-PC pronounciation, laughed out loud. The nurses, as far as I could tell, just ratcheted up the sedation.
ReplyDeleteBoth: Thanks, nevertheless, for taking my post seriously, both in your own way. It's serious to me. The point you may have missed is not that I feel the need to make people laugh, but that it's an ominipresent urge. I'm never free from it. People outside my family who know me (less than half a dozen since I can't be described as sociable) may even be waiting for the shoe to drop.
ReplyDeleteSabine: I don't consciously "add control" to this urge. It is a way others may interpret my urge if they take time off to analyse it. I'm not sure I would willingly court the company of someone who I thought was trying to control me. The benefits of laughter might not be sufficient compensation.
I take your point about "normal". It was carelessly chosen. One of the burdens of restricting my posts to 300 words, but since that limit is self-imposed (and I believe usually benefits readers as well as author) it is no defence. What I intended to say was: given the general antipathy most people have towards being controlled, might my urge be regarded as socially unacceptable?
Your snippet is admirable and apt. I have a further urge - less detectable I hope - to live outside the contours of the bell jar. I refuse, for instance, to comment on the weather. Or to accept green beer just because it's St Patrick's day. I have spent a professional lifetime avoiding clichés and regard such activity as cliché behaviour. So, snap.
MikeM: This was very dangerous. You decided to tell a joke. The disadvantage is that jokes often come in two or more parts and this demands compliance on the part of those who are listening. With my three-word terminal bombshell they have no choice. That said, the circumstances created a compliant audience, although you were still taking a risk in that most experienced proctologists must quickly have heard all the many witticisms that their trade attracts. You scored .500 which in baseball terms is good play. Were the circumstances to be repeated (and I wouldn't for a moment wish that on you) you'd be wise to choose a joke with wider scope, that took in the nurses.
I understand completely. Totally normal.
ReplyDeleteMy Opa Willi was an amazing joke-teller (and I still try to live up to his example). It is completely acceptable and desired (especially in today's climate). Joke telling is human. It connects one with others. My Opa Willi would often bring the house down with his jokes, and I loved him all the more for that.
ReplyDeleteColette: Of course it doesn't always work. On my third or fourth day in the USA I was introduced to a posh lady living in the Fox Chapel area of Pittsburgh. For some reason we started talking about the Queen Mother. I should have taken heed when Posh Lady said, "Oh yes, the QM was from the Bowes-Lyon family.", a factoid I was barely conscious of. But I went on in my anti-monarchist way, probably something in shockingly bad taste about the incidental benefits of the French Revolution. Posh Lady's face froze, her voice strangled. As if I'd blown my nose loudly during The Creed. Posh Lady was more monarchist than any Brit.
ReplyDeleteRW (zS): My funnies are not jokes as such, jokes take too long to tell. They are more like small explosions and are tailored to the person I'm addressing; often teasingly the opposite of that person's opinions. It's risky but it works more often than not. However I can see how Opa Willi, having achieved a reputation, might have gained himself a willing audience prepared to offer their time.
Be careful with the humour! I was (some years ago) being offered quinine for relief of night time cramp, and asked if it would be sufficient to take tonic water at bedtime. On being told it would help I then said "and can I put the gin in it too?". She (the GP) agreed it would do no harm, but I now find it is permanently on my notes as "Patient will continue with the nightly gin and tonic"...
ReplyDeleteFed: And there is yet another salutary matter. You and Pat have been staying with us for the Hay Festival (starts next week as you well know) for 15 years and never once have I offered you a G&T. I think I might have thought it "too strong". I hope to break this inglorious tradition when you arrive a week tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteNice to know that our moral defects, as well as our health defects are on record in our GP's files.