“He’s so funny,” my coworker whispered as I walked away.
“Right?” said the other.
I hadn’t intended at that moment to be funny, and like most humor—a comic noise in reaction to something they’d said—it makes no sense out of context. Not worth repeating.
But aside from the pride I felt having earned that description, I noted something else. Her comment implied that my funniness was ongoing. That I was a reliably funny person.
This may not seem like much of anything. But it was another moment reminding me of how things had changed, how not so long ago I wasn’t funny, because nothing in my life seemed funny. How I couldn’t see anything beyond my own pain.
When I look back on those years I think about my buddy, Smooth Operator, who could make me laugh in spite of the mess of my life. Our long-distance texts or FaceTimes were my lifeblood. They got me through. And even though, at that point in our friendship, I had feelings that he didn’t return, I needed his humor and his friendship so badly that I endured the pain of an unrequited fool. I needed him, and his superpower of making me laugh till I cried as my life burned down around me.
And now, a year or two later, I’d been called funny. So funny.
I’d forgotten I was, could be, liked to be funny. That I could crack open the day for an inch of light. That I could make the day different, lighter, to people around me for a few seconds.
“Humor is tragedy plus time,” Mark Twain supposedly said. I’m so grateful for that time that I could cry.