Reflection on Engaging Humour Pathway: Everyone is a Critic

The following is the text of my prepared speech, “Reflect on Your Path” project.  This was delivered at AIA Toastmasters.

My fellow Toastmasters, esteemed guests, and random hobos.  Good evening, greetings and salutations.  We all love nothing better than a captive audience. 

This is my third Pathway completed, and next year, I will be doing another.  The idea is to work towards my second Distinguished Toastmasters, because, well, I can.  Also, because I have no other hobbies, and the alternative is exercise.  What I must say, however, is that Engaging Humour, as a Pathway, is far more challenging that Dynamic Leadership and Visionary Communication.  A dynamic leader simply needs to point to a goal over the horizon, and then sit back.  A visionary communicator merely needs to find someone to blame for tomorrow’s woes.  We do it well, and that is leadership.  Humour is such a personal, cultural phenomenon.  We have yet to satisfactorily figure out why people laugh,  We have yet to document exactly what people find humorous.  We do not know precisely, how they engage with mirth.  We only know that we all find different things funny, and for different reasons. 

As such, Engaging Humour is a journey of the self, not the other.  Before contemplating the humour of another, I need to understand what I find funny, or at least, amusing.  In that journey of discovery, looking within, and reading material from comics, comedians, and wits, I have come to an epiphany, a realisation, that humour is born of discomfort, of coping with pain and loss, or even as a means to aggrandise the self because no one wants to feel belittled, diminished, discarded.  So we resort to humour. 

Personally, humour has always been very much an intellectual exercise.  What we laugh at tells ourselves, and others, a lot about who we actually are.  There is no safer humour than laughing at ourselves.  Dr. Stephen William Hawking said, “Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.”  Essentially, humanity is a virus with clothes, ascended apes.  We should not get ahead of ourselves.  To that end, we live our lives to be a better example, or a spectacular warning. 

Humour is our way of coping at our troubles, our failures, our stresses in life.  Humour is the reason people with small children do not eat their young.  Humour is the reason couples stay together at the worst of times. Or maybe it is BDSM sex.  One or the other.  Humour is how much of humanity collectively decided that democracy was the best way to govern.  What better way to manage the clowns that vote them into political office? 

In this reflection, I have to come to realise that any humorous speech must address some point of pain.  It can be relationships.  It can be the economy.  It can be anything.  As the speaker, we wear that speaker persona, and give voice to the voiceless, and put our collective pain in a humorous context so we can laugh at ourselves.  Secretly, we all crave a bit of pain in our lives.  That is why we invented marriage.  Socrates said, “By all means get married.  If you get a good wife, you will be a happy man.  If you get a bad wife, you will become a philosopher.”  Let me tell you a secret: Most men are philosophers.  The rest are gay.  Marriage is the reason why we have religion.  Because we have found Hell, there must be a Heaven. 

We use humour as a means to cope with our personal insecurities.  We can all relate to failure, to embarrassment, to personal loss.  And then we tell jokes about failing.  As George Denis Patrick Carlin said, “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”  It is humour that makes us realise that failure is not necessarily a and thing.  A lot of good things came out of failure.  Literature, art, inspiration for great works and achievements are all borne from it.  Spectacular failure birthed great achievements.  We all love that redemption arc. 

I took this Pathway because I wanted something different.  I am witty, but I am not the sort of person that does a litany of jokes.  My sort of humour is shared among close friends.  It tends to be scandalous, biting, sarcastic.  My superpower is the ability to put down a person with a cutting retort, not regale people with Disney-ism.  This is an example of my sort of humour: 

John Montague was the fourth Earl of Sandwich.  In an infamous exchange with actor Samuel Foote, which I will paraphrase, John Montagu, declared, “I think, that you must either die of the pox, or by hanging.” 

Foote replied, “My lord, that will depend upon whether I embrace your lordship’s mistress, or your lordship’s principles.” 

In my personal life, and we always emphasise a personal narrative in Toastmasters, a lot of the things I have done, or been through, are not the sort of stories we can tell in a Toastmasters meeting.  They are better told over a glass of whiskey when the children are asleep.  I have been a naughty boy.  Here is a sanitised story. 

When I was in school, I once caught about 30 tree lizards.  Those of you who are older know what they are.  They range in size from around 10 cm to more than 30 cm.  I put them in a box, and I brought them to school.  I put them at the back of the class, and left them in the box.  What happens when you leave 30 lizards in a box?  They fight.  And when they fought, the box moved.  And eventually, that box toppled over, and we had 30 tree lizards running around the classroom.  The girls screamed.  Some boys screamed louder.  The teacher screamed the loudest.  This made the lizards panic.  When they panicked, they run up trees.  There are no trees in a classroom.  There are, however, a lot of legs.  The lizards started running up the legs of the boys and girls.  A large one ran up the teachers pantyhose.  I never saw a woman in high heels jump so high.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you almost get expelled. 

What does this tell us about humour?  Sometimes, it has to be uncomfortable for someone.  We can look back now, 30 years later, and even think it funny.  It was not funny then.  And this lesson applies to everything in our lives.  All our pain, all our distress, all our troubles, will one day come back and tell us it was one big lie.  We live, we learn, we then make it a joke.  Everyone is a critic, and we are our greatest critics of ourselves. 

And with that, I want to leave you with two pieces of wisdom, learned from other people’ experience. 

If you sleepwalk, never sleep naked. 

And never, ever, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.