"Just a Joke"

It sounds like an excuse, doesn't it? "Hey, it's just a joke! Lighten up!" Like the sort of thing you'd hear from a group of bullies, or from somebody who'd just insulted you and doesn't want to deal with the consequences of being called out as a jerk.

But I've found myself thinking it a lot. And I wonder if often it's true: Some things really are just jokes, and we don't need to get so ruffled about them.

This is an issue for me, both in public and private. In public, as you all know, I do improv comedy. Full of jokes. And nothing is sacred. I've dived right into subjects that some might find offensive, and others have dived into subjects that make me uneasy. But I'm finding more and more freedom in being unafraid as a performer, and also in being harder to offend as an audience member.

On a personal level, my sense of humor has gotten me pretty misunderstood. A few people have assumed that because I state something in a humorous way, I must not be taking a situation seriously. (On the contrary, I find that humor is often an acknowledgement of the seriousness of a situation, because that's when levity is most needed.) Or they have experienced jokes as taunts and mocking, and assume that must be how I'm using them, too. When I first encountered this, I was shocked. My experience was that humor was a form of inclusion; you joke around with people you like. Any teasing is done with affection, and requires a kind of intimacy. And it's indicative of trust -- you trust that the other person meant well, and they trust you to take it all in good fun.

I learned the hard way that not everyone functions on this level. I've been accused of having terrible motives behind the things I say. It was incredibly hurtful to have people I thought of as friends take one of the traits I felt I wielded most skillfully -- humor -- and tell me that they saw it as a destructive weapon. I spent a long, agonizing time looking inward to see if what they said about me was true, and eventually came to the conclusion that it was not. In my need to understand how they could have misjudged me so drastically and so aggressively, I came up with analogies.

One is that of a high school varsity baseball team. Imagine them throwing the ball fast and hitting it hard. Then imagine a 9-year-old on the field. If the teenagers include him in the game, it's a compliment, an indication that they see him as an equal. But if he's not used to that kind of game, freaks out a bit, and gets hit with the ball a few times, he's not going to have any fun. His pain is real. But it would be wrong for him and his mom to declare that the other ball players are terrible people, that they meant to hurt her son, and baseballs are weapons that should be banned from our schools. I felt like one of those ball players. I tossed jokes to my friends, they had no idea how to handle what was coming their way, and in return for a baseball I got accusations thrown at me. Where this metaphor breaks down: I never expected them to play at my level. I was always careful. But it wasn't enough, which made it even more surprising and difficult when even my slow pitches were mistaken for grenades.

From what I've observed, "taking a joke" is largely a matter of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Are we going to assume we know another person's motives, and further assume that those motives are bad? Or are we going to acknowledge that we all bring our own shit to the table, and perhaps our reactions have more to do with our shit than they do with the joke-teller? I'll even give an example by fessing up to shit of my own: I have a big nose. I know I have a big nose. So if, in an improv sketch, somebody in character decided to make fun of my character's appearance and called me a fat, scuzzy-haired, big-nosed stink-bag, I wouldn't react to the "fat," "scuzzy-haired," "stinky" bits, but I might feel a twinge at the "big-nosed" bit. But I'd be wrong to assume that the other actor meant anything by it, or that they even think I have a big nose. It's my issue. I could even approach it optimistically and hope that they consider that insult to be as fictional as the other three.

That last point is important, because the way I and many people I know use humor is to tell others that things are OK. You don't make fun of something if you think it's a real problem. Which means that, if somebody makes a joke about something that feels scary or sensitive to you, you can take it as a sign that it might not be as bad as you think. But to do this, you again need to give that person the benefit of the doubt.

This applies to public situations, too. There are some performers we come to trust, and we can take jokes from them that we might not take from an unknown. But we can choose to give the benefit of the doubt, even when unknown performers are involved. It'll stop us from making unfair accusations about people we don't know, and it will keep us from getting our feelings hurt so often. Less pain all around.

I think, in our culture, we have a tendency to take offense and express outrage because it shows that we care, and that we have standards. But from my vantage point, it seems like that's just a large-scale way of making ourselves look good by making others look -- and feel -- bad.

It's a lot more fun to be free to laugh.