Growing Up Unfunny

[These men > are not sharing a joke.]

I don't know about being funny.
My family didn't much value humor when I was growing up. 

My father, the son of Sicilian immigrants, is very literal minded, which doesn't make for laughs. Then, Sicily is not an island that floats lightly in the blood. Sicilian humor is bizarre, along the line of dead baby jokes. 
My father had rejected his parents' culture, anyway, to become a college professor and to marry my mother. (He does have a darling childlike side, but I didn't see much of that growing up.)

My mother, the Southern belle, was caught up in suffering and tended to tell me stories that reflected her mood. I grew up hearing about the Holocaust. When I was nine, she told me you should never smile when you say the words "Hitler" or "Nazi." (I broke her law when I went to see Life Is Beautiful, and laughed. I did not discuss this with my mother.)

To be fair, my mother could tell incredibly funny stories, in the Southern tradition, when she felt like it, but never about herself and never as relief from suffering.

For my intellectual parents, humor was suspect. It was insufficiently serious, except for humor that relied on prior knowledge. I remember my father loving a joke about the koala-tea of mercy being unstrained, for instance, a pun on "the quality of mercy." 
But that sort of humor rests on the pleasure of feeling superior more than the pleasure of laughter.

The one with the comic gift in the family was my little brother. When our mother died, he told me he had always resented being the funny one, it made him feel like a performing seal. He wanted to be seen as smart, not funny, and in our family, those two didn't go together. 

I think he may be funny with his wonderful wife and other people, but toward me, he expresses the Sicilian gift for resentment perfectly. His seasonal cards, which are the only time I hear from him, are whetted blades. The last one was a personal photograph he'd added a copyright statement to. I'm sorry, I can't show it to you or he'd sue me. (He's a lawyer.)

So, I never learned the art of humor. I only even started to see it as an art, something you could practice, like the piano, last summer, when I got interested in the art of acting because over and over, the Star Trek actors at the Las Vegas con said that what we saw on screen was, in fact, acting. 

They kept answering fans' questions about "How did you feel when your character did this or that?" with the response, "I was just pretending."

Pretending.
My parents didn't do that. It's not that they never laughed, but it wasn't something one cultivated. We barely even went to see funny movies, we went to see Death in Venice.

Last fall, I took an improv class, wanting to learn how to loosen up some of those "you must always be serious" shackles. But I didn't like the teacher, and I spent a lot of time resenting her. 

Its hard to loosen up enough to be spontaneous when you're watching out for slights. (This is a very Sicilian problem. They--we?--may not be very funny, but Sicilians are geniuses at being offended.)

I didn't get very far, but when you start from nothing, even an inch is progress. I keep working on it, in my way, which means I think a lot about it.

Recently, you know, I've become fascinated with Stephen Colbert. I think because he's obviously intelligent and knowledgeable, which I value, and yet at the same time, he's willing to be entirely undignified. This combo gives him an elasticity, a tippy-cup bounceback, my parents (and their children) didn't have. He's both powerful and ridiculous.

My parents were (are, my father's alive, but he doesn't read my blog) rather rigid, brittle people.
If you're trying to maintain your dignity at all costs, which is the job of the Sicilian male, you are not going to drop your emotional trousers in the public square for anything. This was a part of his inheritance my father didn't reject.

And if you feel that you're suffering alone, like my mother did, watching what looks like a mockery of suffering is like stabbing yourself with a fork.

Stephen Colbert has worked a lot with 
< Amy Sedaris (Strangers with Candy, etc.), and her humor is something else again. 
Talk about no holds barred. I wish she'd been my improv teacher, even though she sorta scares me. 

I bought her book I Like You; Hospitality under the Influence, and some of it makes me uncomfortable. Unlike Colbert, who never loses the sense that he, the actor, is a nice guy--and I like that--Sedaris gives few such reassurances.
I like that, too, in a hard to admit way.

Because of course that's another rule from childhood: 
you should always be nice and never make fun of anyone (this was reinforced with super glue and nails in my politically correct twenties). 

Some of this comes with being female--be nice or people won't like you. Some of it comes from taking care of a beloved mother who was always suffering, so the idea that people are robust enough to take a joke was just a theory to me.

Also, mock a Sicilian at your own risk.