A while back, on The Livejournal, I may have made an off-color joke. It may have been something like
Everyone knows you can trace all the world's problems back to the Jews Blacks Mexicans poor people!
..and maybe someone got a little offended, and I might have gotten indignant and there may have been some heated exchange of words and I may have refused to admit that the comment was in any way offensive and I may have called the offended person an "up-tight bitch with a cross crammed so far up her ass that she craps splinters".
That might have happened. I won't say it did. But it might have.
Later, when I'd sobered up, calmed down, and actually re-read what I wrote, an apology was in order. Not because I felt like what I'd written was offensive, but because I could see how someone could be offended, and I had refused, flat-out, to even consider that point of view, dismissing it out of hand. My first lesson: Other people are real, too.
I know! It's hard to accept. Other people are actually real people. They exist, and they are just as important as I am. Hell, even when I'm writing this, I have some urge to snark it up and say something like, "Well, almost as important as I am, anyway," but that's the point. As a rule, and I think, as a society, and maybe even as a species, my, and I would argue, our, natural instinct is to refuse to acknowledge others' existence as anything but play-actors in our reality.
My second lesson stemmed from my first. It came after a bit of thinking. That lesson was simple: Humor is about bad things happening to people that aren't you. How awful is that? Think of some of the funniest things you can, the sort of things where you're in tears laughing. Tell me someone didn't have something bad happen to them that made you guffaw. Myself? Dead baby jokes will make me snicker every time, no matter how many time's I've heard it. Every time I hear about some really retarded domestic dispute in Florida, I can't help but laugh. This is, by the way, why Reno 911! is hilarious. And it is hilarious, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
But the big one, the answer to "What is six times seven?", the grand poobah, the sort of thing that the movie star stops and says, "It's so simple! Why did I think of that!" .. that one is this: You're taking yourself too seriously.
You're a monkey. You're a freaking monkey. You're a bald, fat, tail-less monkey that can type. Good job! Did you know that at least 90% of the shit you're stressing about doesn't really matter, in the grand scheme of things? Look around you, look at all those other, fat, bald, typing monkeys worrying about what other fat, bald, typing monkeys are doing and saying. How funny is that? Be Valentine Michael Smith, at the zoo, grok?