If you’ve never read the Craigslist “Best of” section, I highly recommend that you at least give it a look. Some of it is seriously funny. The type of funny starts at the low-brow and go all the way to being sublimely intellectual. The best part? It’s democratic. Only the most popular posts that are voted on by the readers are listed.
Recently, while perusing through the “Best of” section of Craiglst, I’ve noticed something disconcerting about the city I live in. I’ve come to the conclusion that Dallas/Ft. Worth, the city I’ve adopted as my home town is seriously deficient in humor. I’ve been an avid reader the “Best of” section for over a year, and I’ve yet to see one posting that came from DFW. Tulsa (OK) has more humorist listings than we do. No offense to Tulsa residents, but that’s just so wrong on so many levels.
No one wants to admit that the area they reside in is full of humorless people who take themselves overly serious. Yet, I am faced with a mountain of evidence that DFW is full of people who don’t like to laugh at themselves or anything remotely funny. I’ve noticed this fact for many years, but I’ve chosen to ignore it. I was hoping that there was undiscovered reserve of humor in some pocket of DFW that I may eventually find. After 10 years here, I think I can say with some confidence that we, collectively, are below average in the humor department.
A few years ago, I took a date out to a comedy club. The comedian was definitely not Eddie Murphy (at the pinnacle of his career) or even Martin Lawrence, but he was funny. He had some ethnic jokes concerning the Chinese and the Japanese spoken language and how it sounded. I thought it was funny and I laughed out loud. Later when we were leaving the show, I ask my date what she thought of the show. With a countenance that belonged at funeral, she said [paraphrase, because I can’t remember the exactly phrasing], “I think my parents wouldn’t approve of it.”[1] First, I immediately knew I wasn’t going to see this woman anymore. Second, I wanted to scream, “What the HELL?!! It’s a comedy routine, not Shakespeare.” Now, ethnically I’m Chinese. I had the most reason among all the other patrons in the whole place to be offended, but I wasn’t. Why? Because I saw the humor in it from a different point of view. There was nothing malicious or hateful in it. It was an observation rooted in ignorance and some of the funniest things in life happen when ignorance is involved. Go look at Engrish.com or the Darwin Awards. When you’re in vacation in another country, watch what some your fellow citizens say and do. I’d recently heard of a girl whose family had relocated from Colorado to the New England area. Her classmates at the new school asked her if she rode horses to school back in Colorado, because anyone west of the Mississippi is still on the frontier and by inference a hick. If that isn’t some kind of funny, I don’t know what is.
Note:
[1] Note the tact she took in answering my question. First, she was doing her best to be unoffensive. Second, she took the diplomatic tact by using her parents as a proxy to say that it wasn’t funny. Please don’t do this if your date ever asks you a question like this. Just say what’s on your mind. This way, said date will not post it on the internet as an object lesson.