Funny Together

Sometimes, we are funny together. All of us. At more or less the same time. Singing a silly song, maybe, playing a funny game. Walking a funny walk, talking in funny voices, in foreign accents, in slow motion.

For me, being funny together with my wife, my kids, my grandkids, is almost always the funniest, the deepest, the most deeply funny.

We’re not being silly. No way. We’re being funny together. Magically funny. Even when we are doing silly things, it’s not at all about being silly, it’s all about the funniness that we’re creating together. The magic of it. All about the laughter we are sharing.

I think those times when we are funny together, those amateurish, funny together times, we are funnier than comedians and clowns. Funny beyond clever. So funny, we are taken by surprise by how funny.

That’s funniest fun, it seems to me, the fun of being funny together.

It’s hard sometimes to remember that. Especially if you’re in the funny business. Like a comedian or clown or something. You get so much into making people laugh that it gets to be you vs. them. Comedians say that about their acts, how  they “slayed” the audience, how they “killed.” So you stop getting very much out of it. You burn out trying, because making people laugh is not like laughing with them, not like when they’re making you laugh. You get funny with no fun. Just ny.

Then there’s being funny with strangers, which I consider some kind of miracle, some kind of blessing. When I’m funny with, not funny for. When I’m being just funny enough to invite someone totally new to me to be funny, too. And that person, that stranger, invites me back, and maybe we are not so funny, but we are good, surprisingly good, witty, both of us, responsive, smoothly creating funniness together, in a theater so private there’s really no room for audience, funny for each other alone. Strangers, together, engaged in a kind of intimacy that is funny beyond laughter.