Your source for humor?

"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth." - George Bernard Shaw

I have always read newspapers starting with the funny pages. I read (and pass on) the jokes in my e-mail before opening any other message. I watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but not CNN. And my first choice of movie is usually a comedy.

Costa and Mallick include Finding Humor as one of their Habits of Mind. - those attributes shown by people "having a disposition toward behaving intelligently when confronted with problems, the answers to which are not immediately known" - and write:

People who engage in the mystery of humor have the ability to perceive situations from an original and often interesting vantage point.  They tend to initiate humor more often, to place greater value on having a sense of humor, to appreciate and understand others' humor and to be verbally playful when interacting with others.  Having a whimsical frame of mind, they thrive on finding incongruity and perceiving absurdities, ironies and satire; finding discontinuities and being able to laugh at situations and themselves.

Not a bad habit to cultivate. And a person's sense of humor needs cultivation.  To that end, I have some must-read humor websites that I read on a regular basis:

• Scott Adams blog. Adams is funnier as a writer than as a cartoonist, He also takes lots of interesting stabs at solving world problems. Check out Nerd Pickup Lines from last week.
  
• Joy of Tech cartoons. Lots of technology industry inside jokes, but now and then a real knee-slapper. I liked this one:
  

• Most peope know of Garrison Keillor from his NPR Prairie Home Companion programs (that are available as audio downloads), but I enjoy his Old Scout political columns even more. (You need to be a wee bit left of Ann Coulter to appreciate the writing.) My only complaint about them is that I can't seem to find an RSS feed on the Minnesota Public Radio site.
  
• I think we all know The Onion's hard hitting print newstories (National Endowment For The Arts Funds Construction of $1.3 Billion Poem), but their website is also a great source of audio and videocasts as well.
  
• And of course Despair.com has my favorite greeting cards but also has a blog, videos and podcasts.
  

One chapter in Machines Are the Easy Part; People Are the Hard Part, reads

34.    Work a little humor into every communication effort.
What did Ole say when the Kinsey Sex Survey called and asked him if he smoked after sex? “Don’t know. Never looked.”

All right, it’s an old joke, but it made you keep on reading. There is really no excuse whatsoever not to inject at least a little humor in to every communication effort you make. It’s a mistake to confuse dryness with professionalism.

If you want the head paying attention, you have to get the heart involved. Humor is probably the easiest way to evoke an emotional response. (A groan is an emotional response, right?) You can elicit anger, fear or sadness to get attention as well, but for my money smiles do the job better.

Oh. I wouldn’t make my jokes any racier than the one above.

Your favorite source of humor? Blue Skunk readers want to know! Oh, and next time I read something you've written, it better include at least one chuckle!

Illustration by Brady Johnson.

North to Alaska

I've had the privilege of being invited to speak at conferences in Alaska twice - in Anchorage in 2000 and in Fairbanks in 2004. With this great state so much in the news as of late, I started reminiscing a bit about my short experiences there.

Two conversations especially left an impression on me.

The first was with my van driver on a 14-hour-long trip from Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle. I'd booked an extra couple of days hoping to get to see Denali Park after the conference was over, not realizing that Alaska actually closes between Labor Day and Memorial Day. Really. No trip to the park. But I did ante up an ungodly sum of money to ride in a supply van from Fairbanks along the pipeline to the small rest area you see in the photo above. I then got in another van and rode back to Fairbanks. I did see a couple of moose and received a signed certificate that proves I was north of the Arctic Circle (by at least a foot or two.)

I heard a lot about Alaska life from the van's driver, a former Alaska Department of Transportation worker. I learned mostly about building roads on permafrost. But I also learned that he goes out hunting each year and makes sausage from the bear he shoots and that he and his wife enjoy eating their bear sausage for breakfast each morning. I appreciate hunters who actually eat what they hunt. And I sense most Alaskans do just that.

The second conversation was with a bus driver in Anchorage. I overheard him complaining about "goddam taxes." I was curious.

"But you don't have a state income tax, do you?"
"No."
"And you don't have a state sales tax, do you?"
"No."
"And you get an oil revenue check from the state each year, don't you?"
"Yes."
"So what taxes are so high?"
"Property taxes. Goddam property taxes."
"So what's the value of your house and what do you pay? I'll let you know what mine are in Minnesota and we can compare."
"Well I live in a camper on the back of my pickup so I don't actually pay property taxes. But I hear they are goddam high."

Unfairly, I'm sure whenever I think of Alaskans, I think of these conversations. Of course, I met and talked to lots of educators who seemed to be pretty nice, normal people. Well, at one event, they were wearing Velcro suits and using a trampoline to vault themselves onto a wall where they hoped to stick, but other than that...

I also left with an appreciation that there really are other places in the world with colder climates than Minnesota. The living conditions in the state are challenging for many residents. Alaskans, in my experience, are tough people.

Oh, this is no way an endorsement of Ms Palin as VP pick. Just a reminiscence...

One of the few rest stops from Fairbanks to the Arctic Circle. March, 2004.

Never judge a book

by the box it comes in.

You can imagine the excitement in the office this morning when these boxes showed up in the book processing area:

I asked everyone to hide their eyes while (operating from pure selflessness), I carefully opened these potential pits of perversity and prurience.

And found...

that our local book and magazine jobber has been reusing boxes. The relief around the office was palpable. With maybe only one or two sighs of disappointment.

Things might have been interesting had the education reporter for the local newspaper stopped in.