Humor and Your Mental Health

I got the bad news yesterday.

After noticing numbness in my left hand and stiffness when I turned my head to the right, I went to my doctor, who ordered an MRI from the neck up.

“I’m going to give you something to stop the voices in your head making the dumb blonde jokes.”

After the results came in, he sat me down yesterday with a serious look on his face.

“You”, he said with a maximum dose of medical gravitas, “have an abnormal brain.”

I was speechless for a moment.  Then, after taking a deep breath, I spoke with difficulty, barely suppressing my sense of rage at life’s unfairness.

“Doc, my wife has been telling me that for years, and she doesn’t charge me a $10 co-pay.”

Why does he need an inflatable boogie board?

One’s sense of humor is as vital to the healthy functioning of the human mind as, well, something else that’s also pretty important.  According to folk legend, once you cease to dream, you go mad.  According to the U.S. Department of Labor, once you cease to laugh, you work at the Internal Revenue Service’s Department of Enforcement.

 

 This is your brain.

This is your brain while listening to a joke about a priest, a rabbi and a lady snake charmer.

What causes a man, when he sees a mail-in offer on the back of a Rice Krispies box for a “Shrek” inflatable boogie board, to become lost in a fog for days, muttering to himself “Why does Shrek need an inflatable boogie board, and how can I work that into a piece of approximately 700 words that will be of no interest to any print or on-line publication that pays in actual legal tender?”

Agnes Moorehead.  Irrelevant to this article, but she is wearing a babushka. 

I don’t have the answers to those questions.  But I do have something to say to people on the internet who have the courage to take the risks involved in posting content that they self-identify as humor, risking ping-backs from Russian dating sites and disapproval from assorted wet blankets:

You have abnormal brains.

Copyright 2007, Con Chapman