Bloganuary Day 7 prompt: What makes you laugh?

What makes me laugh the most is goofy and stupid humor. I am fond of quirky irreverence and people who are the opposite of uptight. I like people who don’t take themselves too seriously; in fact, they don’t take themselves seriously at all, but they still care about serious topics.

Dad jokes make me giggle. I like old-fashioned slapstick humor. I grew up on a steady diet of reruns of Laurel and Hardy and The Three Stooges, despite being about 40 years too late for them in the 80s, when I was a kid.

The physical, cornball humor they reveled in is so lacking today. Modern comedies rely so much on mocking people that I find few of them funny. Satire can be at times funny but mocking people is not to me. A good example of a comedy that most other people younger than me found funny but I found horrible was the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up. Mocking people is low-brow in a junior high school way.

Admittedly, I like low-brow humor, but I don’t like making fun of people. I like laughing at jokes, which is a form of storytelling of its own. I can remark upon the humor of them but I cannot for the life of me tell a joke of my own.

Finally, sometimes you just need to laugh at yourself. I haven’t been properly embarrassed in years. If you asked me what my most embarrassing moment was, I couldn’t tell you; I’ve learned to laugh at myself, my clumsy mistakes, my lack of coherence at times in speaking, my stumbling through life. That is the true joy of not taking yourself seriously and not caring what others think.

You’re always smiling at yourself instead of trying to look cool. Because if you can’t make yourself laugh do you even understand humor?