People Who Can’t Recognize Humor (literally)

One of the most mind-boggling discoveries I made while becoming a professional humorist is that a large segment of the general public has no sense of humor. I mean that literally, in the same way that some people can’t tell the difference between good wine and bad, and some people are tone deaf. Humor appreciation is like every other human capacity. Some have it, some don’t.

My best estimate is that about a third of the public don’t possess the capacity to even recognize humor when they see it. But they pretend they do, for social reasons, the same way I used to pretend I liked expensive wine. The reality is that I couldn’t distinguish an ordinary wine from a great one. Both gave me the same type of headache. (I no longer drink alcohol. I see it as poison.)

I don’t mean this post to sound judgy. We all have different skills and different capacities for enjoying different things. I appreciate humor but I don’t get any joy whatsoever from drinking wine, and I don’t have much appreciation for music either. So let us not feel superior for having one type of appreciation that others do not. None of us have the full stack.

In support of my hypothesis that one-third of the public do not even recognize humor when they see it, I give you this satirical video as Exhibit A. On Twitter, lots of folks believed this was serious. Including the part where she mentions Morse Code via blinking. 

I made a similarly satirical video yesterday that generated a lot of hate-tweets from Trump supporters who didn’t realize I was joking. To be fair, my video ended with technical difficulties before I could clarify to the audience that I was presenting satire. That made it worse. But the people who are not humor-challenged knew it was a joke from the title alone. See if you can tell I was joking. My video is here.

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You might enjoy reading my book because of all the ways you will appreciate it.

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