Hit Your Head and Break Your Funny Bone

Knocking on a stranger's door with a pillow got me my first job in New York.  I'd come to the city 4 months earlier to organize a festival, and had just moved in with friends in Brooklyn.  My second evening there, I bought a pillow at a nearby bodega.  I climbed the 5 flight walk-up, hugging the enormous pillow.  Out of breath, I extracted my keys out of my purse and stumbled to the door.  Much to my dismay, when I tried to put my new key in the lock, it met with resistance and the hair-raising scrape of metal-on metal.  I finally got it all the way in, but beyond that it wouldn't budge.  I coaxed it left, jiggled it right -- all to no avail -- it didn't work.  I was locked out.  To make matters worse was I was meeting a friend for dinner in an hour and a half.  

As I wracked my brain for solutions I heard a phone ring  in the neighboring apartment, and a muffled voice answer.  Should I ask my neighbor if I could leave my pillow?  I couldn't take it to dinner with me, and certainly didn't want to leave it in the hallway ... But this is New York, I couldn't just knock on a stranger's door ... it wasn't safe.  I'd heard the stories....  

The next week I started my job as (writing and production) assistant to V, an African American Albino comedian/actor/director.  Before I started that job, I had never been to a stand-up show, but soon I was going them all the time.  I quickly developed the reputation as a terrible audience member - I didn't heckle or anything - I just sat in the crowd with a "make me laugh" deadpan that sucked the humor out of the room.  I found some jokes funny, and I liked most of V’s, I would just feel bad when jokes made fun of people, and crude humor just seemed stupid to me.  The harder people laughed, the more miserable I became.  It felt as if I were the outsider on an inside joke.

I didn’t understand it, I would crack up in one-on-one conversations, but somehow the stand up wasn’t hitting me.  “I only laugh at funny comedians,” I would say.  “You shouldn’t encourage bad comics.”  This from the girl who proclaimed herself a lay-down comic and created disinhibited comedy routines during her stay in the hospital.

Years later, while researching my book, I ran across an article on TBI and humor and it suddenly made sense.  Evidently people with damage to their right frontal lobe (where the worst of my injury occurred) often don’t get certain types of humor.  Our ability to appreciate humor and enjoy a hearty laugh is stored in right hemisphere and chiefly the frontal lobe.  Damage to this part of the brain, as well as tendencies toward concrete thinking, and loss of abstraction contribute to not being able to grasp certain types of humor.  Contrary to the study, physical humor, slapstick, and crude humor were what baffled me, but all brain injuries are different - I'd simply injured a different part.  http://www.neuroskills.com/tbi/pr-humor.shtml

Recovery from TBI is a lifelong process.  Often, after first months of therapy, recovery can slow to a trickle, and it can seem like you are not moving forward at all.  Excitingly, I can use humor as a yardstick to measure recent recovery.  Like creating or recreating any pathways in the brain, the humor ones take work, patience, and persistence.  A few months ago I went to the stand-up filming for Awkward Kings of Comedy (a documentary about black nerd comedians coming out soon) and I almost laughed until I cried. http://www.awkwardkings.com/

Last Saturday my friend C and I went to the Iron Mule Short Comedy Film Festival in TriBeCa, and I laughed and laughed -- the films get better and better.  It was such a fun night; 92Y is a great new venue, the live music before hand was a lot of fun, and the after part was, as always fabulous.    http://www.ironmulenyc.com/index.php

It took a while, but I think my funny bone may have finally healed.  Life is comedy -- it's so much better when you can enjoy it!