When you write something that gets delivered in some way (a book, eulogy, a love letter), you later think of things you left out, or come across things that could have gone in.  Well, in Newspaper Land where this column lives, that can be easily rectified!  Time marches on, but no big whoop because yesterday’s news is yesterday’s news and it’s always a new week. 

To that end … I wrote a month ago about how our messed-up world needs more laughs, that column titled “How To Be Funny.” We had become sorely in need of the medicine of laughter, as it were, in trying tymes. As the world has since somehow gotten even more messed up, I dive into this topic again. Because we need laughs. 

Make Up Words

Use words that don’t exist and see if your listeners run with it. What’s really “sub” about suburban? How about “peri-urban”? Toss it off in conversation, and people will just think they’re behind in the endless modern renaming of things (“TEMROT”). Similarly, create fake acronyms.

Incorporate Weird Things People Have Said into Your Lexicon

Years ago, a friend was driving through a toll in Jersey when the toll booth operator asked repeatedly and incomprehensibly, “Er Zed Poss??” After much back and forth, it was determined that she meant “E-Z Pass.” To this day we call it Er Zed Poss.

Be Unintentionally Funny

Which is funny in and of itself, because you cannot plan to be unintentionally funny. You can soundunintentionally funny, like Suzanne Somers (or a dozen other “dumb blondes,” including Dick Smothers, who played that well), but it is of course intentional. 

Think: Yogi Berra. 

He was clearly not unintentionally funny. It was brilliantly faux faux pas, one after the other.

• “Nobody goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”
• “You can observe a lot by just watching.”
• “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

But When Someone Is Unintentionally Funny for Real,

it’s comedic gold. In high school, someone meant to say “the genteel aristocracy.” He said instead by mistake, “the genital aristocracy.” Which conjures up all manner of images. Some 40+ years later we still laugh about it. 

This happened to me recently. I said, regarding something having to do with Halloween, “Oh goody, something for me to sink my teeth into!”  Ha ha, said a colleague. Realizing I’d likely said something unintentionally funny, I guessed: “Oh … you mean like bobbing for apples?” No, she said: Vampires.

Misapply Slogans to Other Products

A radio station did this once, years ago. They took existing corporate slogans, and applied them as if to promote Viagra. I remember only this gem: “When it Absolutely/Has to Get There/Overnight” (FedEx’s tag line at the time). 

More Absurdity, Please!

It seems that when you become successful in sports, you start your own steakhouse chain. Or BBQ, or something resembling a Chili’s. Successful in music? You develop your own gross-looking “clothing line” or, more hilariously, “fragrance.” (I want to go around smelling like the woman who sang such forgettable songs as [can’t name them].)  When I hit it big, which will be never, I will start a “line” of dignity-based enema kits, create a “lifestyle plan” that involves eating while watching TV, and invent a “fragrance” for dogs. I will call all three “Ann,” just to hammer home my “brand” and all-around greatness, and my legions of sycophantic fans will make me rich, richer, RICHER, R I C H E R,  
R I C H E R R R R R R. You can never have enough.

The Laughs You Give

It may be naïve of me, but it seems that our talk about “fighting against hate” – whether the hate referred to means vicious acts by one group against another, police violence against unarmed civilians, an unsuccessful “War On drugs” that seemingly did nothing, egregious cruelty to children and animals, or 100 others forms of hate – I feel like the “fight against hate” just creates more of the same. Like the Hatfields and the McCoys*: an endless cycle of hateful violence. We humans maybe have this “fight against hate” thing backwards. Yet: how do we love or laugh our way out of attacks and atrocities? I don’t know. Still, perhaps there’s something to it. Maybe it’s like the Southern Poverty Law Center taking away Ku Klux Clan properties in courts of law and, with love, turning the land into summer camps for disadvantaged children of color, thus giving people like me who “hate” haters … the last laugh. Just throwing it out there

Good laffs to you. Because love is one million more times more powerful than hate, and because laughter is a form of love, and because laughter dries tears. Good day.

*Read Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, chapter 6.

Ann Aikens’ darkly comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops at annaikens.com; more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com.