When I was in high school my buddies and I weren’t the most ‘popular’ guys. But we were probably the funniest. And one of the ways we were very funny was to make fun of other people. We were very good at it. What we lacked in ‘physically beat you up’ ability, we made up for in ‘verbally beat you up’ ability. It was fun and it was oh so easy.
Part of the reason I was good at it was that my mother was good at it. She was very funny. She laughed easily at all sort of things. But in particular she loved to skewer people who were up on their high horse about something, or just because they had the money to show off how high their horse was. I liked that about her, it kept her down to earth in my mind.
But as time went on, I started to notice that this humor was keeping her from meeting people, was keeping her from having friends because she wasn’t just poking fun, she was also doing a bit of judging without knowing the people. She was making assumptions based on their wealth or clothes or country club. She retained her humor all her life, but as life took it’s toll on her she had less time to judge and more time to just enjoy people. I liked seeing that.
At the same time I started to see the same thing with me and my friends. We were losing out on knowing and becoming friends with people because we were too busy judging them. As one would hope, that adolescent judgment mellowed out as we aged and it wasn’t our only way of being funny as we got older.
When I had kids of my own I really wanted to make sure they found ways to have fun, be funny, even poke fun, without cutting off good people just because they were different, just because they may have ‘appeared’ to be a fool. I wasn’t always good at leading by example in this because I still can make fun of people pretty easily.
The truth is, maybe those other people you are laughing at are fools in certain areas. I know my share to this day (and they know me), but you run the risk of losing out on knowing the other parts of them as well. And that could, in the end, quite easily make you the lonely fool, right?
Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman of The Napkin Dad Daily
“To make a trade of laughing at a fool is the highway to become one.” – Thomas Fuller, 1608-1661, English churchman and historian
>Hmmm, you make a good point Marty… thanks for this.