Unlike the poisoned barb of satire and the killing point of wit, humor is healing.
It is not only wholesome, but re-creative and rejuvenating — a jest that breaks no bones. Laughter is the best medicine.
It doesn’t fly to assault the mind. It is warmly sympathetic, playful, sometimes light-hearted and sometimes hilarious — unlike wit that is sudden, startling and usually scornful. It leaps audaciously and wickedly, it is probing and critical.
I had thought, analysis on starting this little piece — that I should spell out what humor means to me.
Heaven help, because it takes on many things. I deal with either frustration or accomplishment, pleasantness or unpleasantness, inferiority or superiority, sense or nonsense, or at any rate, some emotion that can be analyzed.
How do we know when to laugh? Or how do you take the skin off a joke from a disciplined eye and a wild mind?
There must be courage, no awe for humor. In my mind, it is encapsulated in criticism but with respect. What we do not want is cruelty or poking fun.
Fashion police ridicules transgression, leaving fashion captions in tatters.
Operas are lampooned, movie critics skewer mediocre films, books are revised (and not always good heartedly) before they become Pulitzer-winning.
Some feminists find some works of men annoying — that annoys me.
We are fractured by a comedian’s fractured English.
But time and taste change. Some of the pieces I roared out in my youth still seem the best of their kind.
I have a towering respect for literary humorists, since my younger years.
I point enormous satisfaction, if not near reverence, for Oscar Wilde, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw.
They were at their best, unsurpassed in their ornaments of humor literature.
There must be some lagniappe to the fact that humorists had read something written before 1918.
What strange force compels one to be a humorist?
A writer’s way is rough and lonely. In all understatement, their lot is a hard one. Yet, there are those, with their pride and ignorance, deliberately set out to make it harder for themselves and consider comedy a profession.
I have also embraced the younger humorists. They are quirkier, wilder, darker and more eccentric writers and artists.
After all isn’t humor a reflection of its time? A product of and a comment on the society, politics and customs of the day?
There is hardly anything sadder than humor past its prime. A lot of of them are stamped with an expiration date, like a carton of milk — the clowning of Lucille Ball, Jack Benny’s pauses, humor spoken in the voices of W.C. Fields, Mae West, Jimmy Durante.
I regret that silent scripts of Charlie Chaplin are no longer here to make us laugh.
It is good to laugh a lot. The world is a fruit basket of jokes and allegories for the taking.
I have had a normal conversation with Mang Dolphy and I laughed so hard, I had to be helped to recover my breath.
Vice Ganda once stopped in mid-story, sashayed and said: “Stop laughing and listen!”
Martin Nievera convulsed me with a dialect anecdote that I doubled over — my eyeglasses fell off and I pushed my face into the shoulder of a stranger seated next to me, to keep me from collapsing.
Comedies that we read make us smile, giggle, shriek or laugh insanely, with a range of sounds — from cooing pigeons, to a lunatic having a seizure, or to the collective sound of a crowd singularly choking on a bone.
I remember that time I had to stuff my fist into my mouth, as a concerned stewardess leaned down to offer help. A passenger told her that I was crying, but I was laughing, choking and rubbing away tears.
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