For the average person, walking into my dorm room and trying to keep up with the somewhat niche topics and jokes that we are throwing around would be like trying to swim with Michael Phelps. It just wouldn’t go super well. My friends and I were all raised in different places, in different ways, and had different experiences growing up. Yet we have now reached an age of maturity and have somehow found common ground in what we find entertaining, and more to the point, what we find funny.
For my part, I grew up semi-homeschooled and then matriculated to private Christian school for middle and high school. I lived in what some would call the “sticks,” but it was really only a turn off the highway. I grew up consuming content in large part from YouTube, as much of my generation has, and I watched the movies and shows that my parents liked.
In the same way that one may acquire certain musical proclivities from their parents, so too I found my sense of humor forming as a result of the movies and shows I was exposed to. Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, John Cusack are all names that I was familiar with growing up. I watched that old sitcom “Wings,” and I am sorry if you hadn’t realized that show was thirty years ago.
As far as the World Wide Web side of things goes, social media and the Internet at large are inescapable in terms of their reach and power over my generation’s development; I have followed and known of countless creators over the years, all of which have no doubt in their own way fine-tuned my sense of humor. That is, however, enough meandering scene-setting.
This past week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Professor Ted Kluck, who discussed with me and enlightened me on the topic of our sense of humor, both as individuals and as a collective.
I sat on the humble-but-ever-comfy blue couch that occupies Kluck’s office, next to me a set of football shoulder pads that appeared resplendent from battle. Kluck sat opposite me, haggling a bit over the placement of my microphone (which in this case was my phone).
“In the eighties and nineties, it [finding common ground in humor] was almost easier, and here’s why, I remember very distinctly this experience: middle school, early high school, Saturday Night Live comes on, and it was very important to have watched it, so you could talk about it on the bus on Monday. So, people were all watching the same thing. You had the same thing with Seinfeld in college,” Kluck said, and I nodded as he continued. “There was this shared experience with humor back then, you call it the mono-culture, everybody experiencing the same thing at the same time.”
This is fascinating to hear, as I come from a background where, while there are some exceptions, almost all of the content I consume is more than likely several degrees of separation away from the person next to me. That is the truth of the Internet Age: there is so much content, so many movies and shows, so many poorly cropped TikToks, that to have something in common with a stranger in what we laugh at on a daily basis is nearly impossible. That’s not to say, however, that people have completely different senses of humor.
A completely different sense of humor is a concept that, for me, is hard to grasp. I know that it has something to do with upbringing, with what you were surrounded with, what you experienced.
“‘Tommy Boy’ drops in the mid-nineties, and that’s the college movie, everybody’s dropping ‘Tommy Boy’ quotes,” Kluck continues.
“They still do,” I interrupt, thinking back to a strange time in high school when, for about a week, some of my classmates would do a poor rendition of Chris Farley in “Tommy Boy,” specifically the scene where Tommy holds Richard’s coat hostage, sings for a bit, and then accidentally causes a massive tear in the coat. A funny scene, and it brings a slight smile to my face as Kluck goes on.
“I think the common thread here, generationally, and I see this in my kids, they still place a high value on the way that humor brings people together,” Kluck said. “The fact that I can quote ‘Step Brothers’ with my two sons, it’s a way of bonding us together.”
So the answer to part of the question of why humor matters is that it brings us together. Finding anything in common with a fellow human can be rare, so it can be rarer still to find a sense of humor in common.
Knowing, at a subterranean, unaired, unplumbed level, why it is that our senses of humor are the way that they are may not be possible. What you find funny and what I find funny may be complete polar opposites. Such are the times, that things have slowly grown to be polarizing, that you now have to pick a side or get off the field. However, finding something funny, and I mean funny in your heart and mind, in a deep sense that encompasses all of your experiences in life while also appealing to the tiniest function of your brain, is a uniquely human contraption. I say it like that because studies have shown primates and other animals to have what may be referred to as a “sense of humor,” but I can assure you our own human contrivance to create and find things that are arranged in a certain order, with particular details all their own, to be funny, is singular.
“People have been walking around feeling like it was funny, but not having the courage to say, but when someone finally says it, you’re like ‘Oh my gosh, that’s so funny, I’ve thought that for like, five years,’” Kluck said.
I nod and agree with Kluck, having found a common ground and learned, if anything, that when it gets down to brass tacks, that sharing in the odd organic-machine of humor is an exercise totally divorced from any other human function.
