The other day I had nothing better to do than play around for a few hours on the Internet and I accidentally stumbled across something called Gum Tree, which is apparently the Australian version of Craigslist, and on it someone had placed a very funny advertisement that had quickly gone viral. It was an ad (with photo) for a very pretty used ivory-colored wedding dress placed by a man whose ex-wife had apparently ran off with his best friend. The caption read, “Wedding Dress for Bride Seeking Eventual Infidelity”, and below it were these words:
“Due to be married soon? Not planning on staying faithful? Want to sleep with one of your husband’s closest friends? Then this is the wedding dress for you! It’s a one-of-a-kind garment designed by Benedict Arnold and believed to be derived from the very cloth that Judas wore while betraying the only son of God. It is guaranteed for approximately two years of reasonable marriage-mediocracy before the complete and utter disintegration of your relationship due to extramarital promiscuity. This harlot-sized garment will make you the envy of tramps everywhere on your fraudulent wedding day. Not looking for much. Make an offer.”
When I had stopped laughing, I forwarded it to a friend of mine who quickly wrote back that he loved it, too, and that it was the kind of humor he would expect out of an Australian guy. So, later that evening, I found myself wondering about why it is that people living in different parts of the world often have very different senses of humor. I even recalled a column I had written many years ago about how a scientific study had somehow discerned that men and women also find different things to be funny because they have different brain chemistry, with women preferring more cerebral humor with long narratives, while guys are perfectly happy with the Three Stooges doing their thing.
Anyway, while trying to make some sense of all this, back to the Internet I went, and sure enough, there was all kinds of information about how people living in different parts of the world have very unique senses of humor. For instance, although there are of course many exceptions to every rule, it would seem that the consensus was that the British are into witty and ironic humor, the Irish like to tell long funny stories, the Germans like their humor dry, the Japanese goofy or dark, the Russians self-denigrating, the Australians raunchy and crude, and Americans like to laugh at life. I even ran across a few jokes that tried to make the case for some of the above generalities that I just have to pass along:
An English woman is distraught because she fears her husband is having an affair, so she goes out and buys a gun. The next day, she sneaks away from work and just as she suspected, she finds her husband at home and in their bed with another woman. When she presses the gun next to her own head, her husband jumps out of bed and pleads with her not to shoot.
“Shut up!” she screams at him. “And you’re going to be next!”
An Australian man is walking down a street with a case of beer under his arm. His friend, Arnie, stops him and asks, “Say, Boke, whatcha got that case of beer for?”
“Well, I got if for my wife, you see.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Arnie. “Great trade!”
An American woman’s husband has been going in and out of a coma for many months and she has stayed by his bedside the whole time. When he finally comes to his senses, he motions for her to come closer to him.
“You know,” he whispers to her, “you have been with me through all the bad times. When I got fired from my job, when my business failed, when we lost the house, when I got shot by that irate husband, and even now, when my health has started to go south. You know what?”
“No, dear, what?”
“I think you bring me really bad luck.”
The older I have gotten, the more I have realized that the one thing that makes life’s many ups and downs bearable is a good sense of humor. In fact, it is usually humor that keeps us from making all the unimportant things important, which of course is the key to keeping one’s sanity. And when it comes to the people I want to have in my life, I always try to remember something W.H. Auden once wrote:
“Among those whom I like, I can find no common denominator, but among those I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”