Losing Your Sense of Humor

I've been thinking recently about losing my sense of humor--I came within a hair's breadth of losing mine recently.  It made me wonder what it would be like to lose it, permanently.  

It made me want to spend some time thinking about comedy and humor.  Somewhere in my academic education, I was introduced to Aristotle's Poetics, which provided the classical basis for defining tragedy and comedy.  Aristotle focused most of his attention on Tragedy, that being what Aristotle believed to be the highest form (followed by epic poetry, then comedy and lyric poetry).  My sense is that Aristotle (and the Ancient Greeks in general) believed life to be a tragedy--they must have hit upon the realization that all life ends in death and drawn the obvious conclusion.  Comedy, instead described drama in which the hero arrived at a happy ending, not in death (although there is no escaping death).  Another way to look at it--Tragedy is the fall from grace, and Comedy, the rise in fortune--both of a reasonably sympathetic character, of course.

But back to my student days--not long after Aristotle's Poetics, we studied tragicomedy, a more modern form that seemed at once to be a better fit.  It involved people like Ibsen and Chekov and, eventually, the Theater of the Absurd, including the likes of Beckett, Ionesco and Edward Albee, aall of whom focused on the absurdity of a world without apparent meaning that ends in death.  With that said, absurdist drama contained much in the way of broad humor.   We learned somehow that we need not fear what we could laugh at.  Death can be stared in the face, just like anything else, and its burden made lighter with laughter.  The fact that tragedy remains in the mix is just realistic, that's all.  Christopher Morley put it nicely--"Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs."

With all that out of the way, what must it be like to have lost your sense of humor?  People rarely admit to having no sense of humor, although they may admit to having no skill in the telling of it.  People without a sense of humor sometimes react to it with downright anger.  George Saintsbury once said  "Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it."  

I read not long ago a discussion of political correctness, asserting that its proponents lack a sense of humor.  Martin Amis said, "What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything."  

OK, so losing your sense of humor is serious.  I have talked you (and even myself) out of losing it.  Medical researchers tell us that humor is therapeutic, too.  But, how do we keep it?  No one has offered a perfect prescription that I have heard of.  If Morley is right, the mix of important and unimportant will keep us seeing the comic alongside the tragic.
  
Surround yourself with funny people, some say.  Watch funny movies and read funny books. (Oddly enough, even forced humor has a beneficial effect, according to some medical studies).  Personally, I'd recommend Dave Barry books, Mel Brooks movies, maybe even some Monty Python.  I recently found an article with nineteen (19) recommendations for keeping humor in your life (way too many to remember).  I do recall number 18. "Experiment with jokes. Learn one simple joke each week and spread it around." Here's mine for the week: “What do you call a line of rabbits walking backward? A receding hare line.”