To Laugh, Or Not To Laugh...

I'm grateful for Dane Cook. I couldn't sleep much last night, so I caught a rebroadcast of his "Vicious Circle" show on HBO.

I'm grateful because Cook makes me laugh. I mean really laugh, not just a snicker or two. And for me, the significance of that is, he's contemporary, he's young (is "hip" still allowed?) and that means that my sense of humor isn't lost, or locked into the Stone Age.

Previously the same evening, I stopped by my niece's house. She was just starting to watch a DVR recording of the most recent MTV Movie Awards Show. As I came in, the show's host, Sarah Silverman, was beginning her opening monologue. I sat through the entire thing, watching the audience laugh out loud, yet I didn't even crack a smile. Silverman made a quasi-racial joke, and the camera caught Samuel L. Jackson, whom I believe only "laughed" when he realized he was on camera. But not a laugh from me. Not once. Her whole act left me dry.

The show featured movie spoofs, not even a chuckle. Appearances by Will Ferrell, Sasha Baron Cohen, not a grin. I watched people rolling in the aisles, but here I sat stone-faced. At one point, I checked my pulse to see if I was still alive.

"What's wrong with me?" I thought, "What happened to my sense of humor?"

I didn't "get" Borat. One night, the same niece had me watching "Talledega Nights" with her, and it might as well have been a dry documentary, judging by the amount of laughs it got out of me.

Now last night, my niece rewound a couple of things to laugh at them again, yet my face thought it was at a funeral maybe. It really does bother me because I'm not uptight, I like to laugh, but you don't really control that reaction, do you?

Did you ever watch a young child who does something that gets a laugh? The kid loves the reaction, and the attention, so she'll do it again and again, but of course the laughs become fewer and farther between, and usually the parent will say something along the lines of, "OK, that's enough now..."

That's kind of how my brain interpreted Silverman's act. Something like, "OK, these buttons have been pushed way too many times for it to be funny." I could almost predict everything she was going to do or say. It just left me stoic. But I don't like not having a sense of humor.

So I later brought my grumpy self home. And when I saw the Dane Cook thing, I stayed with it. And laughed a lot.

I felt better this morning, thanks. Dane Cook to the rescue.