Photos by Peter Tom Tolibas
I never knew how much I loved female comedians. I’m currently reading Amy Poehler’s Yes Please and I’m finding myself simultaneously wanting to cry and wanting to stand up and read out loud the paragraphs that are blowing my mind. I know I should stop getting surprised, but I got bowled over when Amy gets into detail about royally screwing up, using self-righteous anger to buffer your shame, and the gargantuan task of asking for forgiveness and apologizing with your heart. I’m not even halfway done!
I’ve always been drawn to funny people. Mainly because I didn’t think I was and I was hoping that I could work on developing a sense of humor through osmosis. Good news: it’s possible. My husband was one of the people who brought it out of me. One of his bigger secrets is the fact that he has an absolute foul mouth and is the master of schadenfreude. He has had a lifelong fascination with poop. He thinks being politically correct is overrated. He will make fun of people, things, and ideas that polite society should not touch and he says that the act of going below the belt is what’s funny to him, the fact that it’s so absurd. I used to recoil in horror at the garbage that can come out of his mouth, but then I realized that I think and feel the same things too but I never learned how to get comfortable and poke fun at it.
My girlfriends are the same! But add the fact that they’re also all about mismatched boobs, period stains, and old, sagging strapless bras that fall off your chest without any warning while walking in the mall. They have drunken personas like “Elma from H.R.”
We love to laugh and the best kind of humor though comes from intelligent and empathic people! People who make a living making people laugh especially know the whole universe of human emotions and interactions. The best jokes always have all these layers and nuances to them and you can’t wield a toolbox like that if you’re not learned, bendy, and hella smart.
It just makes so much sense the the same people who know all that is about laughter also have the same perceptiveness about things like anger, sadness, humiliation, and defeat. It’s what makes the jokes hit even harder. I’ve read many, many female authors, but the advice and life lessons that thunder in my head are from the comedians. My life is not always peachy and the only way I have been able to soldier on is to laugh at the face of absurdity.
In between trying on all sorts of identities in my 20s, the brightest spark in that timeline happened when I met a concentrated group of funny girls. We all knew each other vaguely but we started hanging out a lot when we did Geek Fights together (and win, mothafackaas!) and the friendships, I’d say became set in stone in 2010 during a phase where we had to have costume parties ALL THE TIME. These were not Pinterest-worthy parties. We didn’t really photograph well because we usually had fake blood spattered on our faces, walked around wearing panda heads/horse heads, and smiled with food in our mouth.
Girls who know how to laugh until they cry know how to laugh at themselves. If I run with this idea that a sense of humor gets born in the ashes of adversities, it would explain why we’re still all so tight. When learn not to take yourself so seriously and when you learn to be perceptive, it becomes so easy to be vulnerable and open. By a lot of grace, I feel relieved that I’ve been spared from a lot of drama with them because we never felt the need to compare, compete, or be insecure around each other. How can you, when these are girls who tend to have their skirts stuck in their panty? My only regret is that I didn’t meet them sooner.
Sometimes I wish someone told me when I was a lot younger that the alchemy of friendship can also be boiled down to figuring out what you laugh at and who to laugh with.
Both Amy Poehler and Tina Fey mention in their books how much their improv training has also set the ground rules for manoeuvring through life. If you want to get into improv, you cannot ever care about how stupid you look. No one gets brownie points for trying to be cool or clever. You should have a “Yes” attitude in improv and that in a nutshell means being able to roll with whatever situation gets hurled at you. Improv teaches you to run with a joke no matter how ridiculous and to build each other up.
“Nobody looks stupid when they are having fun.”
Amy Poehler
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