I'd say 95% percent of my interactions since I took over as President  of the Fenway Garden Society have been delightful.  That other 5%?  Yee-ikes.

I suspect that that's actually the tip of the iceberg.  It's been proven about a quarter of the general population is whack, and surely our little corner of the world is no different.  Once the ground finally thaws, watch out! 


I've been in the Victory Gardens long enough to know that there's an... element, I guess you'd call it.  I mean, we are the ultimate outpatient facility.  Most of our members are quirky, and I'm happy to count myself among them. 

But there is a sort of self-styled Fenway Garden Society Star Chamber engaged in a world historic struggle for the heart of the Fenway Victory Gardens, pursuing their secret intrigues like characters in a Dan Brown novel. 

I'd had inklings of their existence before, but now I know.  Cross them, and, well, watch out for antimatter in your marigolds.  These people are serious.  Like seriously serious. 

Humor is something most of us take for granted.  We assume everyone's got a sense of humor, even if it's not always as sophisticated and wildly irreverent as our own.  But there are actually a lot of factors at play.  Genetic.  Developmental.

In the last decade or so medical science has really started to go to town on the question.  Studies have shown that the humor-processing pathway of the brain includes parts of the frontal lobe important for cognitive processing, the supplementary motor area, important for movement, and the nucleus accumbens, associated with pleasure. 

We also know that there are neurological conditions that impact the sense of humor.  A Rotman Research Institute/University of Toronto study not long ago found that

people with right anterior frontal damage had the most disrupted ability to appreciate written and verbal jokes — and funny cartoons — compared to the normal control group and people with focal lesions elsewhere in the brain. Individuals with right frontal damage chose wrong punch lines to written jokes and did not smile or laugh as much at funny cartoons or verbal jokes. They showed a preference for silly slapstick humor — surprising but illogical endings which are the hallmarks of such acts as The Three Stooges.

Humor is also implicated in autism spectrum disorders and Asperger Syndrome, which is sometimes characterized by "weaknesses in areas of nonliteral language that include humor, irony, and teasing.  Although individuals with AS usually understand the cognitive basis of humor, they seem to lack understanding of the intent of humor to share enjoyment with others."

There does seem to be increasing evidence for a very particular "Asperger humor", however.  One individual with AS has lamented

Ironically, while some clinicians characterize the majority of people with Asperger's as lacking in a sense of humor, this sense is one of my great assets—but also one that has repeatedly gotten me deeply into trouble with people who lacked the intellectual firepower to understand it. How I wish others could see things from a perspective closer to mine! Others have consistently categorized my sense of humor as "dry," which seems as good a label as any. How disillusioning it is that many people just don't get my gift!

And there's the rub with humor.  Just ask Charlie Sheen.

Many years ago when I was teaching in the little village of Püspökladány in Eastern Hungary a student of mine was in a terrible accident.  While standing on one of the narrow platforms at the rural junction waiting with his girlfriend as the train pulled in he was struck by a door someone in one of the cars had opened before the train came to a full stop.

Dezső, a dashing, quick-witted athletic boy popular among his peers, suffered brain damage in the accident.  His movement was severely impaired, and he had to learn to walk and talk again.  But just as he could not move with the same agility and ease as before, his speech was slow, slurred and affectless for some time after the accident. 

During one of our visits in the early days of his recovery, he cracked a joke.  I think I must have said something like, "Dezső, how are you feeling today?" And he must have said: "Like I got hit by a train." Ba-dum-bump.

I have to admit, it so took me by surprise I was speechless. 

I was apparently not the first one to react like this.  He complained that his friends didn't seem to know he was joking when he made jokes about getting hit by trains.

Yes, I assured him, they know you're joking.  They're just horrified.  I mean, maybe jokes about getting hit by trains are only really funny to people who've been hit by trains. It's niche humor. 

Plus, I told him, you've gotta work on your delivery, kid, which honestly wasn't that great before you got hit by a train. 

(His ultimate recovery, by the way?  Nothing short of miraculous, owing in large part to the absolute and unwavering devotion of his mom and grandma — I have never seen anything like it.)

Point is:  what Dezső was trying to do with humor is what evolutionary psychologists agree it's for, at least in part — to help navigate uncomfortable social situations. In fact, it's been suggested that "the enjoyment associated with humor eventually replaced the pleasure associated with social grooming in primates." 

This is probably to do with the size of our bits, if you want to know the truth.  We do have the largest thingamabobs among primates (who all think we look utterly ridiculous, by the way), and I'm sure they were always getting in the way of social grooming.  In fact, I'm sure that "social grooming" was just a clever euphemism early man came up with for "hand job."  Kind of like how today "back rub" means 'blowjob". 

I mean, come on.  We've all had the boyfriend who could never just spoon.  It always ends up as forking (or at the very least sporking) with him.   

It was always in the way, so we started covering it up.  Otherwise we'd never have gotten anything done, much less learned to make tools and build fires, make art and build civilizations (such as they are, alas).  But when we started covering them up we had to find new ways to make fun of each other.

Et voila: Humor was born.

Or something.

I don't know.  But how you get through the day without a sense of humor, how some folks take seriously some of the things they take seriously? It's probably clinical, but it still seems like a missed opportunity to me. 

Or as the great and terrible Roman Polanski once put it: a dirty joke without the punchline.