inqk.net

I really like the word ‘superfluous’. I think part of the reason is because it’s one of the few words in English that is what it describes. The word ‘phonetic’ is not phonetic. The word ‘mispelt’ is not mispelt. The word ‘long’ is not long (indeed the word ‘short’ is longer than the word ‘long’). But superfluous is. I mean look at that ‘uous’ at the end. You can’t tell me that was necessary. That’s putting on airs, that is.

It seems wrong to say this but I think I’m a funny guy¹. For me the interesting thing about this isn’t the ability to make a joke but that I can clearly recall a time when I couldn’t. This has always struck me as odd. Humour seems such an integral part of one’s personality how could it not have been there all along? Being funny is like being tall, right? You are or you aren’t and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Now I’ve always been a smart kid². I remember being one of the top students in Miss Sutherland’s kindergarten class and after moving to Dubbo one of the academic superstars of St Lawrence’s Infants and then St Johns Primary (not a typo, it really didn’t have an apostrophe). But I can also remember not being one of the funny students in any of those classes. There was John (I want to say Denver). His last name escapes me but I remember he made people laugh (he also taught us all swear words and was the first person I ever heard use the word ‘cunt’).

There was Adrian, my best friend at the time. Adrian was very, very funny. He was a bright student and was blessed with a gift for comic timing. I recall him bursting into a rendition of Milli Vanilli’s 1989 megahit ‘Blame it on the Rain’ that made our Year 3 teacher, Miss Carberry, laugh. This is the earliest recollection I have of any student making a teacher laugh based on something that they said and at the time I was desperately jealous of Adrian for being able to do it.

I can also remember walking home one day with Matthew Piper (another funny kid) and asking him how he was able to make jokes. Matthew was one of the rounder students in the school (a problem with metabolism he explained to me once) but lightning quick with a comeback. He was the sort of kid that the other kids didn’t dare to tease because chances were he’d end up making you look bad.

Matthew explained to me that he didn’t consciously make jokes. He just opened his mouth and they came out. I puzzled over this for a long time. When I opened my mouth nothing came out. Or if it it did it usually involved me informing the would-be taunter that I was rubber and they were glue and whatever they said was going to bounce off me and stick to them. (Even at the time I recognised this was neither funny nor clever. Not to mention logically incoherent. What did ‘I am rubber’ even mean?)

I don’t think I actively worked at trying to be funny but little by little being able to open my mouth and have jokes come out of it became something I could do with increasing frequency. At first it was just with my family. During one of our frequent family get-togethers for Christmas, Easter or someone’s birthday I remember my grandparents and my mother laughing heartily at some remark I made. Whatever it was is gone now but it was the beginning. It gave me the confidence that I could be funny. I just had to find the right thing to say.

I remember I used to have a rule for myself. It was to never make the same joke twice³. Once a joke was made that was it, it was gone into the ether, never to return again. And if I wanted people to laugh at something I would need to come up with a new joke. At some point the rule lost its divine sanctity and I stopped hewing to it so strictly. I had lots of different friends, after all, and why deprive them of the benefits of a laugh just because someone had laughed at the same joke yesterday? And so, over time, it just became one of those rules that I broke but always felt guilty about breaking (thank you, Catholic upbringing).

The rationale behind why I couldn’t retell a joke is lost to time now. Perhaps it was a conscious decision on my part to ensure I didn’t lose my newfound ability. I might have thought humour was like a muscle and if I didn’t actively exercise it it would atrophy and I’d be back at the rubber/glue stage. Or maybe it was that it felt like plagiarism⁴. This is absurd, of course. One can’t plagiarise oneself and yet that’s the best explanation I can give as to why I feel guilty when I break the rule.

But what does any of this have to do with superfluous? Well, I’ve been thinking about this whole becoming funny thing for some time now and I think the answer has to do with language. I believe that the reason I wasn’t funny as a kid was because my style of humour relies heavily on an understanding and appreciation for words that just isn’t developed enough in a 10-year-old (or at least not in 10-year-old me). It was only as I grew up, became more comfortable with concepts like irony, understatement and black humour, that I was able to deploy it to generate laughs.

I keep rewriting this paragraph so that it’ll end on a joke. It’s not working though and I’m just going to abandon that attempt. To be honest, I don’t really know what I’m writing here. A moment of self-discovery, I guess. My personal blog seemed like the best place for it so I hope you can forgive the self-indulgence. I had nowhere else to go.