My girlfriend has no humor
The caption for the image above, from a wonderful autumn day in 2018
is: 'One of the flowers decides to cross the field.'
In a book about angels (by Peter Kreef), I read this about humor:
The essence of humor is intellectual: the perception of paradox, or irony, or incongruity, or puns, or disproportion, or the unexpected.
In my girlfriends family, there are contests to explain to her why something is funny, and I don't think an explainer has ever "won." Either she gets it right away or she doesn't. Probably, the fact that she didn't get it right away means that the story, anecdote or cartoon is disqualified. That is, her own idea of "funny" admits of no intellectual process by which the arrow can strike home. It really is an arrow with her, either finding a target or clattering uselessly to the ground. I also think of a doctor searching for a reflex with a little rubberized hammer.
I can't help but detect some element of her will behind all this, some little bit of pride at the refusal to accept an "arrived at" humor through intellectual consideration. There is some depth to her apparent lack of depth.
Am I insulting the most lovely one in my life by saying she has no humor, therefore no intelligence?
No. Because I see in this stubborn apparent lack something like the directed use of intelligence in a grand design: she is many things, and is alarmingly found to be in the right ways at the right times. In terms of fitness for her environment, she is a marvel. And, it is elegant to carry only what is necessary for a given outing.
She is on an outing, that one. And she didn't need this particular facility, this quality of intelligence that rapidly abstracts and weighs, laughing as it recognizes an incongruity.
A thought experiment: what purpose would it serve, to leave that sort of faculty "at home" on an outing? Could intellectual humor be misused? Could it obscure something more important?
Before diving into those questions, I should remember that few women appreciate Monty Python. So there is a sex difference, and I might just be "typical manning" with my "why aren't women funny?" toy.
I'll try an argument that would get me banned everywhere. Traditionally, women care for children, cook and clean houses. In those tasks, a "biting wit" is not very useful. You should never use sarcasm with children as you might deeply hurt them, though among adults, a little sarcasm can bring relief to tedium. Intellectual humor is early pattern recognition. But what happens once the pattern is recognized, but must continue to be lived, over and over? That becomes drudgery.
Now, the woman carrying a pail of water every morning may or may not experience her work as drudgery. I posit that it certainly doesn't help to have a kind of intelligence that speedily finds pattern, thence humor, thence the felt experience of toil when the work goes on and the joke is stale. I think it could become like a delicate tool which often breaks and brings more misery to its master than delight. While others go about their business, you are fussing with your strange and delicate instrument.
So entering a world as a woman, I might not chose that particular tool. Now, I know we live in a "liberated" time when traditional roles can be chosen or discarded. Women today urge each other to discard those traditional roles, and to the extend that they do this, they'll probably enjoy intellectual humor more because it is no longer a detriment.
Okay, so I guess that was a shoddy, sexist argument, but I am a bear of little brain so I'll leave it there. I'd rather go on talking about the one I know.
So...moving on to my beloved, she is still unusual among her girlfriends and female members of her family for her particularly resilient "I just don't get it" response to the intellectual joke.
Therefore, I don't think it's only a standard case -- I think it's a special case and when I reflect on myself, I see that my peculiar aspects are in place because of prior error.
A man with a limp will not be tempted to run away from his problems so quickly or so far.
Someone with fair skin cannot build an indolent life around lying in the sun, well-bronzed.
Bad teeth mean you will never be found beautiful, and while this is partially sad, it can open a door to contemplate without ever being the object of contemplation.
On a grand scale of something like a soul, a body is merely an iteration. And "body" is too confining a concept -- personality must be included as part of the iteration. In fact, very little of what one sees of a person in the span of an hour or so is what they really are. You are looking at something designed to achieve some end. Perhaps they are a spaceship with a secret and intriguing mission, vastly more interesting than the spaceship itself, but at first, you only see the type of propulsion used, the composition of the hull, the qualities of the communication systems of the vehicle, etc.
Zooming out beyond the apparent "beginning" and "ending" of a span visible to me allows me to posit wholly practical causes for the effects seen in the span.
And with this method, I come to the conclusion that somehow, my lovely may have misused the instrument of that kind of intellectual humor, and, knowing this, chucked it out of the design of the next vehicle.
And in that, I see her characteristic self. This is a part of her, and I find it so adorable. She says "why do we need it?" and removes the item from the pack before I've finished my preamble.
She is bold. She sets out with only what she needs, and will not complain when she was wrong -- she'd rather muddle through without it than carry too much. And indeed, if something proved unwieldy or dangerous, she'd rather not have it next time. So it seems to me she is the way she is for good reasons. The reasons themselves are hidden from me, but my experience allows me to speculate, and I reach a place of admiration for her choice.
Alan Watts once said that we are more like a little whirlpool in a stream that appears in roughly the same place every year than we are like a rock or a table, even though we appear before you, looking rather heavy, sleepy and "made of matter." Our solidity is an illusion caused by the mismatch of time-scale and our own image-making facility, which does a "full paint," filling in the holes of what the mind takes before it. By time-scale mismatch, I mean that since every seven years or so, every cell in our bodies are different, if we perceived more slowly and steadily, we would have an easier time recognizing ourselves as fluctuating pattern inhabiting transitory and flimsy bodies, than as heavy, dull (though watery) matter.
Hmm...slow down your perception, and solids become more ephemeral. Speed up your perception, and even evanescent things become robust solids...I've got to play more with that!
My idea of the cause of my beloved one's apparent "lack" also explains that strange sense of her own will dancing far behind her eyes as she endures people trying to explain the joke. I think...it is something like laughing.
I think maybe the joke is on us. We who stop the dance in order to explain the dance. We who dissect the animal to find where the life lurks.
I stumble along, attempting to learn the lesson of her way. It is this: do not be all things to all people. Set about your work, and ensure the success of it by girding yourself as a soldier does. She does not multi-task, so her alert stance here in the thrumming bowels of creation is maintained, where there are so many distractions, like carnivorous flowers and enticing paths.
I write this with the most heartfelt sense of honor that she shares her life with me. If I angered you with my blather about woman-kind or "flights of fancy" about soul-time versus body-time, I suggest a hot bath with candles and a good, good book.