My preferred technique has been to share with the world the selection of truly awful jokes that I send to Pam Cole every morning. As she might say, “Why should I be the only one who suffers?” For example, about thirty minutes ago I lit her up with these:
-A pirate walks into a bar with a paper towel on his head. The bartender asks,“Hey, what’s with the paper towel?” The pirate answers, “Arrgh, I’ve got a Bounty on me head...”
-Last night I had a dream that I weighed less than a thousandth of a gram....I was like, 0mg.
-How do you contact the spirit of a dead Italian? With a Luigi board.
-Did I ever tell you about the fat girl I dated once? I’m telling you, she was one fat girl. We met at the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade...she was wearing ropes.
Maybe many of you are getting annoyed with my flippancy at a time of such political and social tumult. The thinking goes this way...At a time when the very foundations of the country are being rocked, where the future of our democracy is at stake and our world is being visited by a relentlessly spreading viral pandemic, it’s time to get serious!!
My answer is...if a time of such foundation rocking, pandemic spreading chaos isn’t a time for terrible jokes, when, pray tell, is?
That’s easy for you to say, Doug. Your guy won. Not at all. If you think my volume of jokes is excessive now, I can guarantee you that it would be off the charts if Trump won. Look, despair is an insidious plague on the human mind. It must be fought with every tool at our disposal. To give in to it invites debilitating unhappiness. Despair robs a person of the capacity for joy, it blinds people to beauty. It is the vowed enemy of a flourishing life.
So, in the face of life’s worst moments, I simply choose to find humor where I can. That doesn’t make me unserious. In fact, I am deadly serious when it comes to the business of avoiding despair. For me it is a daily imperative, to which there is no alternative.
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