Do your loved ones appreciate you humor?
I explain.
During our marriage I have had countless moments in which I really thought I was having for husband the most dull and humorless man in the world.
Still now, after all these years, I have to admit I don’t really know what kind of humor was working for him.
Yet, I know he was a very silly guy, we had belly aching episodes with tears in our eyes because of the laughter but I think we've never shared the same look at life that generates the same humor. His friends and family were roaring laughing around him. I laughed too.
But I don’t think he ever completely got my humor and the fact that I used to make fun of him or poking at his weakness as a show of affection. Not for hurting him.
He didn’t really understand that my humor at his expense was a sign of love and intimacy....that it wasn’t remotely used to undermine him in any way. I loved teasing him. It was a way to show affection. I would make fun of his slow baldness, of his love handles if he was gaining weight or is lack of a rounder ass when he was too skinny, of his poor vision when he was without glasses...nothing was aimed to offend him.. but I guess he never really got how much love was in those jokes...
I have tried to explain to him that Italians can laugh to everything, even love. And when we tease somebody is a sign of esteem. My ex arrived to the point of associating my dry uimor to having just a pessimistic vision of life.....like i was too cynical....a downer......
I have had similar conversation with some Mexican and Italians and they got it perfectly. The Yankees can take themselves so seriously......
Teasing is a sign of affection.
I tease mercilessly just the people I love and care the most. There are a lot of my friends who share my same attitude and reply to me with the same merciless humor ....I love any quick, wit, fast exchange of my same humor....
...
Sometimes I know I have to take back my jokes, I have to bite my tongue because I am afraid I might come out too direct, for some people to the point of rude. My closest American friends now seem to have understood but still, sometimes, I feel some gap between us....
For me nothing is so holy that you can’t chop it down with jokes. Not even the Pope...lol.. In Italy we have a long history of irreverent, iconoclastic, humoristic literature....
.
I read this extract yesterday that made think about all of this;
“The moral subject is transformed into a humorist when people begins to understand suffering as necessarily derived from finitude, as something essential to the human condition” .......(Jorge Portilla).
In short: faced with reality you must laugh or get drunk trying....lol...
Guess my country has been on the stage for so long and seen so much that a propensity to be light in presence of adversity might have been encoded in his Dna...
Did you ever have the sensation to be funny only for yourself? O, worst, only to your dog?....lol...
