When humor is not humorous

This blog has been too serious recently and it is time for a little humor.

I had a teacher once who said that it is hard to understand humor.  The following is a true story, and the person it happened to laughed as she told it to me, and I couldn’t quit laughing because she made this story one of the funniest things you would ever hear, and it was easy to visualize what happened.  So we laughed.

 Lets call her Mary.  She was the administrative assistant in our Dallas office of BGCT (called the Baptist Building).  She was tall and thin, wore heels, hair made up, beautiful clothes, very ladylike and proper and about 60 years old.

Mary had gone downstairs to the lobby and was standing beside the high circular desk in the lobby when she took a step and twisted her ankle and fell on the hard floor.  They rushed her to the Baylor Hospital and checked her over and put her foot and ankle in a cast, gave her a pair of crutches to walk with, and she returned to the Baptist Building. 

She was using her crutches and went through the front door into the lobby and was again at this circular desk in the lobby telling everybody about what had just happened to her.  Her hand went up in demonstration as she talked and out flew one of the crutches and down she went again on that hard floor. 

This time the ambulance is called and she is rushed back to the hospital.  They said, ‘Weren’t you just here?”  This time she had a very badly broken leg and arm.

Now she can’t work, she can’t do anything. She has no family in the city and the closest relatives live in Mississippi. She had to fly to Mississippi so her niece could take care of her.  She found herself on a stretcher, lying flat and being loaded on the plane, with her feet going head first, and she is afraid she is going to fall off the stretcher.

Now that is not funny.  It’s tragic.  But I have tears in my eyes from laughing as she tells me about this.  It is hilarious to imagine this dignified lady sprawled out on the floor, not once, but twice and then in this very helpless position being loaded onto an airplane like she is some baggage.  It is a few weeks later and she is laughing as she tells me this. But it is not funny.

This reminds me of the jokes the pastor of Big Baptist Church writes in his column The Daily Walk.  He was incensed that I called him on his sense of humor, and he wrote me that I was mistranslating what he was saying.  He said he used humor when he writes about women and marriage.

You be the judge.  Here are his three jokes on marriage.

Pastors have a responsibility to their congregation and to the public to be careful what they write and what they say about women.  In all things, they should not belittle any gender of their congregation.