Humor Me

Humor Me

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny.

Sadly, this is as close as I get to being humorous. I’ve always envied funny people, folks who can say something that makes people laugh. They seem to have a knack for it. I live with someone like this: he has been known to stand up in a meeting of ministers and read an otherwise dull report and somehow cause people to chuckle. Partly it’s his dry, western, could-give-a-damn accent, and partly it’s his timing and intonation, where he chooses to insert a pause before delivering what becomes the punch line—only it wasn’t meant to be a punch line, it was just the end of a boring sentence. Which makes it hilarious without trying.

 I, on the other hand, am a good audience. I laugh at pretty much anything. And as a minister I’ve developed a talent for laughing on the inside. Because people don’t like to be laughed at. Fortunately I inherited from my maternal ancestry a strong German temperament which allows me to suppress giggles, and I have a naturally down-turned mouth that expresses seriousness in the face of ludicrousness.

It’s little old ladies who make me laugh. Get a group of them together and it’s a stitch. Partly it’s because I expect their generation to be polite and well-mannered, and partly it’s because as they age they lose some of their social filters, or maybe when they get away from the menfolk they let down their defences. I remember taking a group of elderly churchwomen to tour retirement homes one day, and one place had a large glassed-in aviary with a variety of small birds flitting about inside it. Our tour guide was a young woman like myself, and as the group paused in front of the aviary, she asked if anyone had any questions—about the retirement home, she meant. One little old lady piped up, “How do they breed?”

It took a number of seconds for the question to sink in, during which time the guide looked at me and I could tell she wasn’t prepared to address ornithological reproduction. Finally she said, “Just like they do in the wild.” The enquirer peered up into the glass case and responded, “Don’t they suffocate?” I got as far as imagining two birds doing it and wondering where the concern for their airwaves came into it when I realized that she wanted to know “How do they breathe?”

Another time I was visiting a women’s monthly Circle meeting—definitely one of the circles of hell and as predictable and painful as a menstrual cycle. I only attend these upon invitation, but I do go each time I am invited. Such gatherings typically take place in someone’s living room, where the hostess serves tea or coffee in china cups set on matching plates. Platters of sandwiches—with the crusts removed and cut diagonally into fourths—would be passed around, followed by trays of home-made sweets. And in Minnesota there was always a dish of salted peanuts and a dish of hard mints.

After we’d all been served and re-served, the Circle President would call the meeting to order and most of the dozen or so ladies would give their attention to their leader. There would always be a few hard-of-hearing, however, who would carry on chatting until someone spoke directly into their ear, “We’re starting now,” and they’d shut up. The President would walk us through the agenda that felt to me like the valley of the shadow of death, only I had to act interested because I was, after all, the honored guest. The Secretary would read aloud the minutes of the previous meeting—which sounded like a scene from an existential drama where the audience members pretend to grasp the profound message therein but in fact don’t have a clue because there isn’t one. Then the Treasurer would report on—really—the number of pennies collected for this or that mission fund since last month’s meeting.

So once again I found myself surrounded by sweet little old nuts, when one of them reminded the group to turn in their stamps. By stamps she meant used postage stamps, this being in the days before snail-mail had been decimated by e-mail. This church matriarch was always telling members of the congregation to turn in stamps, and sure enough they would bring paper sacks or plastic baggies stuffed with American flags, eagles, Christmas religious scenes, and Santa Claus stamps, many of which still clung to the corners of envelopes. I estimate it took each individual a good hour or so to fill one bag with about-one-inch squares, and usually folks would bring several bags to church and pass them off to our nonagenarian stamp collector. Personally I tried to avoid this perpetual project like the plague, because it never quit. And while we all had a vague idea that it had something to do with foreign missions, it was a though Christ had died so that we might go out into the world to save stamps.

I recall that as soon as this little old lady had repeated her appeal for stamps, another little old lady turned to a third little old lady and whispered in a way that little old ladies are wont to do—that is, loudly—“What happens to the stamps?”

The third little old lady must have asked herself the same thing because she had a ready reply: “They probably burn them.”

And with that, we bowed our heads for the closing prayer.