What Makes Me Laugh Part 2

The biggest influence on my sense of humor was Jean Kerr of Please Don't Eat the Daisies fame.

She wrote humorous essays, rather long by today's standards, that were published in a variety of magazines then collected into books. I stumbled across them in the library when I was eleven or twelve and they quickly became favorites. I think it's amazing that her observations appealed to me at twelve and still do today at ,,, whatever. She found humor in every aspect of her life.

And with six kids, a rambling old house, and her husband, Walter Kerr, long time theater critic for the New York Times, she was never at a loss for topics. 

Like when they were having dinner guests and she told the kids not to leave their bikes in the driveway or their muddy boots in the entryway and not to use the towels in the powder room. She didn't tell them not to eat the daisies that were the centerpiece on the table. Thus the title of her first collection, as well as a 1960 movie loosely based on it, and a 1965-67 sitcom.

Her kids went to a parochial school and one day her oldest came home looking really disappointed. She asked him what was wrong and he said that they'd been cast for a play about Adam and Eve and he was Adam. When she protested that he was the lead, he said, "Yeah, but the snake has all the lines." And that was the title of another collection.

For years her collections were my comfort reading, if there is such a thing. Anytime I needed a lift, reading one or two of her essays had me seeing the brighter side of things.

Last week someone suggested that I was going to say Monty Python was my biggest influence, but I came to that party too late. I found John Cleese's "Fawlty Towers" quite by accident. I'd set the VCR to tape an old movie, and back then the timing of the movies after midnight was iffy. I learned to add time before and after the movie I wanted in order to the get the entire thing. And one day I found I had the "Basil the Rat" episode and was hooked.

As far as the Monty Python group's work, I find some of brilliantly funny and on downward through dopey to offensive. But all that came later.

I haven't mentioned Erma Bombeck. The Odd Couple. Mary Tyler Moore, Valerie Harper, Betty White. And many others who showed me how to find humor in just about any circumstance.

I can't finish without mentioning Charles Schultz and the Peanuts characters. In addition to providing years of looking at life through a different lens, he helped me appreciate a touch of the absurd. In High School, I had a poster of an exhausted-looking Snoopy saying, "I'd like mornings better if they came later in the day." My mother insisted that it didn't make any sense, but I thought it was hysterical.

I think I could talk about this topic endlessly, but that's enough for now. Do yourself a favor and go read or watch something that makes you laugh and tell me about it.