How have you cultivated your sense of humor?

I can laugh rather easy.
I never bothered to learn jokes. It came naturally.
Situational stuff are the things I enjoy the most.
No favourite artist.
I recommend you watching “The Closer” tv series and you’ll understand.

I really like cynical, dark, shock, and political satire. Our society is a cynical and dark place, so I like to see some humor added to it.

I don’t have a sense of humor. Yet people tell me I’m funny. Or humorous, if there’s a difference. Well, enough people have told me that that now I think maybe I do have a sense of humor.

I’ll try to say funny things, but half the time people don’t seem to get it—this is in real life, not just the internet where no one gets anyone else’s sense of humor unless they are totally brilliant.

The person who thinks I am the least funny in the world is my wife. I don’t think this is a good sign. There must have been a time when she thought I was funny.

I do try to make people laugh. Mostly my humor is of the absurdist bent. I like to tell long stories that only gradually seem to become unlikely and then off, and then absurd.

I never bothered to cultivate a sense of humor. Wherever I looked, there is was, ubiquitous as ragweed. People always encouraged me to pluck it out as they seemed to be allergic. Alas, I seem to be allergic, too. That’s why you see me put on a mask every time I’m trying to be funny.

Ok? Get it? Now pardon me while I head out on the mower. Next time you see me I’ll be a heart attack. I mean, serious as a heart attack.

If I were Greek I could be CWOTUS, the Greek God of Humor. But since I’m just a half-Yankee quarter-Swedish quarter-English kid from the burbs I’m just… trying too damn hard.

I guess the way I’ve cultivated mine is through learning and understanding new things, without that I wouldn’t understand the abject hilarity in many things.

I think I laugh rather easily though my laugh has been described to me as humorless.

My sense of humor has grown over time, I’ve had one as long as I can remember.

Jokes, riddles, a play on words, satire I find especially funny, political humor, observational humor, crass stuff, dark stuff, all sorts of things. I can’t think of anyone I particularly favor.

I’m not exactly sure what belly laughs are but the thing that consistently makes me laugh the hardest is when I’m caught off-guard with a ridiculous comment.

l. Does laughter come easily to you?
Yes, very much so. I often “admit” that I’m easily amused. I am.

2. How have you developed your sense of humor over time (what do you do to keep it going and growing?)
I’m not sure. I never put that much thought into it. I know that my sense of humor is very much like my father’s, so I suppose a great deal of it is learned.

3. What sort of things do you find funny? Be specific – is it jokes, riddles, cartoons, funny stories, situational stuff, satire?
This is so hard to answer. I love all of the above, but I feel like it has to be relatively good natured. I don’t usually laugh about things that other people find funny, if it is hurtful or degrading or mocking.

4. Do you have favorite humor artists?
George Carlin, Mitch Hedberg, Margaret Cho, Katt Williams, Robin Williams, Eddie Izzard…. I could do this all day.

5. Can you give an example of things that give you belly laughs?
My sisters. Vague, I know, but I can’t think of anyone funnier. If you put us all in a room together it becomes a hysterical laugh-fest.

Oh, and here’s something that makes me laugh.

I try to see what other people find funny, and I have been able to see some humor where I once didn’t. My children and grandchildren introduced me to Monty Python, for instance.

I’ve actually kept my funnybone in check as I’ve aged. I admit to being a very silly kid, usually thought of as weird funny more than clown funny. With my closest friends then I’ll ease up and let the inner kook stretch out.

It doesn’t require much effort to make me laugh. I love anything by Emo Phillips or by Monty Python. You can catch me driving along “singing”
along to the CD of “Spamalot”.
I laugh very easily. I have
friends who have told me that
they love to make me laugh
because I’ll laugh at almost
anything. They especially love
to do it when I’m drinking something.

I never actually cultivated it. I just have a very dry sense of humor… that gets me in big trouble sometimes :-p

@HungryGuy Me too…..exactly!!!! Very dry, very keen on word plays. Most people think I am very funny. Has never occurred to me that a sense of humor had to be cultivated. Has always been natural to me.

I have read a great deal of written humor, and seen a lot of wonderful comedys on TV and movies. Bob Hope, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Cary Grant, The Marx Bros, The Three Stooges, Ernie Kovaks…
The unexpected result is that I don’t find much funny anymore. Most of TV is lame, and most film comedy is obvious. I really do like Kevin Smith, Woody Allen, and Aaron Sorkin.

I had my sense of humour cultivated for me. I was raised in a household where you needed to be on your toes or you were the brunt of the joke. I’ve also had a crap load of crappy things happen to me that I have to laugh about or I’d be crying constantly.

When the mood strikes I crack jokes right and left.

I find it very easy to get a good laugh going.

Over time my sense of humor has not really changed, but it has developed. At a very young age I was attracted to things that don’t make sense, random and chaotic. I remember the very first thing that I found very funny, and that was the term “monkey shit”. I was about 4 years old at the time, but oh boy, the concept “monkey shit” had everything going for it. You may be wondering why I still remember that, and it’s because I marched around all day chanting “monkey shit” over and over again until I got my ass slapped.

As I got a little older I found my self laughing at things that where not only random and chaotic, but also mysterious. For example, by the age of 12, the idea of the teacher oppening the desk draw and finding scorpions or hissing snakes was hilatious to me, as it had a panic and mystery element. The main mystey being, why is my desk full of snakes? eeek!.

Now at the age of 28 I know exactly what I find funny, and that is confusion. Confusion is the greatest source for comedy, and what better way to cause said confusion, than with random chaotic madness.

Get a busy street all running around in a panic, confused at the horrible thing that is coming after them that they dont know what it is, and I’m a happy guy.

I like my comedy aggressive and offensive, and out of the ordinary. I can find word play or political jokes funny, but the thing that always gets me the most, is some good old aggressive confusion induced panic.

If we are sticking to random confusion based comedy, I would say an example of something I find funny is Monty Pithon, Ross Noble, The Mighty Boosh, and things of that nature.

However, despite being such a confusion and chaos fan, I do have a good apetite for pessimistic comedy, as I find it has the added bonus of also insinuating some impending chaos or panic.

My favorite comedians are: George Carlin and Louis CK.

Things that give me belly laughs are usually very offensive, or carry some kind of bad consequence for some real or hypothetical person. Or it could just be something that is dirty in an original way. A recent example would be the joke “My dick is so big that I have a foreskin, a skin, and a post-skin.”

I laugh easily in that I’ll usually give a little laugh out of politeness at a joke (unless of course it’s offensive), but as for laughing genuinely? I don’t know. I can’t even think of the last ‘comedy’ I saw that actually made me laugh, if that says anything. I also don’t think most of SNL’s skits are funny (including a lot of the older ones.)

I don’t know about growing my humor. Sometimes I say something, and I’m like “god I’m hilarious” but I think a lot of the things I say that I find funny are pretty much only funny to me and maybe two other people.

Some specific examples of things I find funny: Whose Line is it Anyway? (anything but Drew Carey’s jokes…), The Golden Girls, David Sedaris, The Mighty Boosh, Monty Python, and Dean Martin. I don’t tend to like overly offensive/degrading humor; I think people just use it to make up for not actually being funny.
Most of the things I laugh at tend to be very interest-specific; things that wouldn’t be funny unless you watch a specific show, know of a specific person, or were at least there from the start of the conversation. I guess ‘inside joke’ kind of things, but not as personal.

To be even more specific about my favourite funny people…Greg Proops is my favourite babe Whose Line guy, closely followed by Colin and Ryan (they’re funnier together). Blanche is my favourite Golden Girl. And does Tim Gunn count? He has to. I’ve recently started listening to Tig Notaro, and I laughed at her ‘Taylor Dane’ routine so hard I teared up. Oh and the Torchwood bloopers. God, the Torchwood bloopers…Anyway, I find Woody Allen really funny as well. I like a lot of George Carlin’s stuff too.

Interesting. @poisonedantidote, @plethora and @HungryGuy all have dry senses of humor. @poisonedantidote distills it down to wanting to create confusion, something I identify with, too.

I like my humor subtle, though. I like it so it creates the confusion about whether it is humor or whether it is real. It is particularly humorous when I can make something totally ludicrous be taken seriously.

Is that mean? Is humor mean? If someone takes seriously something that is ridiculous it means they don’t have a good shit detector. Of course, I think there are times when all of us miss the humor. Generally that means we don’t know the person well enough to tell when they are pushing our buttons.

@wundayatta are you trying to make me feel better about the “Occupy” bullshit? It’s just a joke? That’s the best news of the day. And appropriate.

My mother used to have what I un-affectionately call abusive humor. She would make sarcastic jokes, often with quite a sharp and personal needle to them and she would time them at moments that it would be inappropriate to respond in any way. To me, @wundayatta, the point is well taken that sometimes you have to know someone well to detect their subtle humor and that is for intimate humor between friends and inside jokes and all of that. But if one is in any kind of a group setting, I find humor that does not have to be interpreted, that just rolls out, that is welcoming and inviting infectious laughter is the proper use of our great gift of humor.

I cannot see the humor in some things other people see to find very funny, such as the so-called adult cartoons on TV.

I have an excellent sense of humor when I know people are dealing honestly with me.

*Try to get something over on me however and I am a bit of a misery fountain. *I’ll get you even if I wasn’t trying to

I have always had a quick sense of humor and can find humor in almost everything.
Inanity, satire, laughing at myself, parody, but never passive aggressive daggars cloaked as comedic hidden messages.

I’m a fan of the Enneagram personality typology and share a wing with many comedians including Robin Williams, Goldie Hawn and Carol Burnett.

I truly believe that the worst kind of poverty is an impoverished sense of humor. :-)