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Thoughts on Approaching the World More Humorously:
So I think this is a skill and mindset thing that anyone can practice. Like all mindset things, it begins with believing that it might be possible!
I’m going to illustrate this with an unrelated (but parallel) example about what it's like to train yourself to appreciate the natural beauty in the world. There are always easy and accessible reasons to be in a hurry and to put your tunnel-vision blinders on: you’re in a rush to get to work, you’re thinking about an important project, or a hard conversation, or a bill to pay, or something bad you saw on the news, etc. When you do this, your world shrinks to the thing you are focusing on. After all, that’s exactly how focus works!
However, at literally any point you can ask yourself, “Wait… what beautiful things are around me right now?” This prompts you to expand your focus and actively look for things. You might see moss—vibrant, rich green—growing in a crack in the sidewalk. You might see flowers in bloom, a feast for both your eyes and nose. You might look up and notice a particularly fluffy cloud, or the subtle variations in the pastel-light-blues of a clear sky, or tree branches gently dancing back and forth in the wind. Or on the other side of the street, a particularly well-dressed stranger with a distinctive gait, or a child being earnest and ridiculous in that way children do so naturally and adults forget so reliably.
There is a constant abundance of beautiful things to notice, you just have to widen your awareness intentionally to appreciate that.
Seeing the world more humorously works the exact same way. The world is extremely funny and fate, in particular, has quite a wicked sense of humor. She just loves to subvert our expectations and best-laid plans! And there are little contradictions all around us, in both the natural world of planet earth and the socially-constructed world of society. Humor is about the unexpected and the absurd.
So how do you notice the unexpected? Well, you have to be paying attention to things and having expectations. If you’re in a state of tunnel vision and “low conceptual awareness” of the world around you, you’re not going to be having as many expectations and thus you’re not going to be noticing when something unexpected happens. So just like noticing beauty in the world requires having a wider awareness of what’s going on around you, so too does noticing humor.
Jerry Seinfeld has ruthlessly refined the art of appreciating the absurd and the contradictory. He notices that the prices of food in airports are absurd and that it’s funny to think of them as people living in a bubble who straight up don’t know what regular food is priced like in the regular world. He notices that it’s such a funny juxtaposition that women are capable of pouring boiling hot wax on their soft, sensitive upper thighs and ripping the hair out by the root... but then also be afraid of a spider.
I can’t speak to his process, but I suspect it has something to do with: 1) “making lots of comparisons” and then 2) “recognizing the ones that amuse him / refining and leaning even deeper into the absurdity or contradiction.”
Another thing that helps with viewing the world humorously is to be more imaginative, playful, theatrical. You can create backstories for people at the coffee shop. That middle-aged woman who is clipping her fingernails inside of the coffee shop for God-knows-why? What if she’s been cursed by a witch who she double-crossed with a credit card chargeback and so now she has super-fast-growing fingernails which require her to be constantly clipping them? And what’s worse is the witch said she would lift the curse as long as she got an apology but the woman is just too damn prideful and so this is how she lives, a walking monument to man’s fragility of ego?
Get away from literal explanations and explore the world of metaphors, hyperbole, simile, poetry, idioms, etc. Chem trails aren’t chem trails, they’re plane farts. Cats are taking a little homemade shower when they’re licking themself. Dogs sniff butts because that’s where the data is, man.
Or go the opposite direction. Go hyper-literal. Think about any social interaction of ritual and imagine it from the perspective of an alien or cultural outsider. The airline pilot isn’t just “flying”, he’s driving a gigantic metal bus through the sky at 600 mph.
Another approach is to be more flirtatious, maybe even a little sexual in how you see the world, because sexualizing non-sexual things is almost inherently funny. Swiping a credit card in the reader and being like “mm yes baby… was that good for you…”
A lot of humor is just noticing possibilities that already exist in the world. When I’m looking to make a new joke, I’m overwhelmingly oriented towards “noticing something new about the external world around me.” There is vast [comedic potential] stored inside of all sorts of objects, ideas, and interactions, so what I’m doing is less “creating humor” and more “noticing or discovering the humor that already exists inside of things.”
Seeing the world more humorously carries a lot of benefits which are felt by both you individually and others. If you’re laughing and smiling a lot, you’re gonna be feeling good more often! If you’re making other people laugh and smile, you’re gonna be making THEM feel good! Playing with and refining and leaning into this energy can improve your relationships with anyone and everyone (including yourself), and it does genuinely make you more attractive to many people and the world.
Just to give an example of how I benefit from seeing the world humorously: the other day, I stubbed my toe quite badly and angrily said out loud, “Ow FUCK that was a bad one.” As soon as I said that, the part of myself that is primed to notice absurdities and humor said, also out loud, “It could have been much worse.” And this instantly cracked me up, to go from one extreme to the other, and I just as quickly found myself not noticing the pain and instead laughing and appreciating the humor in that transition.
So to summarize, if you want to see the world more humorously, you might explore…
- Widening your focus and awareness of what’s going on around you.
- Making more expectations and predictions about what’s going on around you (because humor works by subverting your expectations).
- Making more comparisons between things (because comparisons reveal unexpected similarities or differences).
- Thinking or acting more theatrically / playfully; you can be the source of the absurd that would make something funny.
- Thinking hyper-literally about social interactions or norms.
- Being more flirtatious in how you think / act, or thinking about non-sexual things through a sexual frame.
- Thinking about how humor is *already* naturally existing inside of all sorts of objects / ideas / interactions, and asking yourself, "What can I draw out of this?"
Matt Kramer 🔪@kramerposts
Things I've been interested in writing about lately: - How to become more secure / less insecure as a man - How to unlearn bad habits or false things you were taught that no longer serve you well - The messages I think young boys need to hear that they won't get from the default culture - The messages I think young girls need to hear that they won't get from the default culture - How to approach the world more humorously - How to feel more innocent about sex and sexual desires - Understanding / appreciating female sexual psychology - Strategies for managing addictions / replacing one addiction with another Do you have interest for any of these in particular? Please let me know!
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