It’s very common for humans to characterize the people we know, especially our family members. Oh, he’s the serious one. Oh, she’s the pretty one. He’s the smart one. He’s the athletic one. I swear, she’s the only one in this family with any grace at all. Sound familiar?
All the members in my family are divided into genres, too:
My oldest brother is The Successful One
My other brother is The Grouchy One
My sister is The Organized One
One cousin is The Wild One
Another cousin is The Quiet One
My oldest brother’s wife is The Social One
My other brother’s wife is The Party Animal
My sister’s husband is The Funny One (though his two teenaged children hardly think so.)
The plot thickens and gets a little more gray on my wife’s side of the family because, for starters, they’re almost all smart. Really. My wife’s side of the family has extremely high and measurable intellects. The labels I can wedge out, though, are:
My wife is The Pretty One (I’m a lucky guy, I know) and The Compassionate One
My wife’s brother is The Funny One (although, I think I deeply offended him recently in front of his new girlfriend, The Quiet One, by telling him his humor has gone down in recent years.)
My wife’s uncle is The Eccentric One
My wife’s cousin is The Tactful One
My wife’s other cousin is The Screwball
My wife’s mother is The Talkative One
My wife’s father is The Challenger or The Precise One (First thing he said when he met me was, Back to back, and had my wife compare our heights. I’m taller, by a fraction of an inch, which does really matter in this case.)
So where does all this leave me? What’s my label? I bet if you asked my family, What’s Chris, on impulse they would say, Oh, he’s The Serious One. But if they put more than a second’s thought in it, they’d hesitate, completely pause, and then say, You know, I don’t really know.
When I worked in restaurants, on more than one occasion a guest told me I was diplomatic. How they gleaned that in the very brief relationship you establish with your server, I have no idea. Asking, “Would you like fries with that?” doesn’t usually reveal someone’s views on foreign policy or display their skill at dealing with another in a sensitive and effective way. However, with a term like Freedom Fries out there, you never know.
I’ve thought about my diplomacy over the years and decided it’s too big a label to live up to. Therefore, I’ve dismissed it from my self-view and wouldn’t write it under the “Tell us a little about yourself” section on an application. And I doubt anyone in my family would call me The Diplomatic One. No one listens to The Youngest One anyway.
What they’d call me, I have no idea. What I do know is what they wouldn’t call me: The Funny One. And it’s not because my brother-in-law holds that family title. It’s simply because they don’t think I’m funny. Apparently, in person, I don’t do humor well. And I agree.
Shooting sarcasm from my mouth is like firing a faulty gun, and it usually blows up in my face and someone walks away crying or offended. One Christmas Eve, my brother, The Grouchy One, got drunk, stood on a stool, and proclaimed his love for my family. Awwww. When I mimicked him the next day, he looked appalled. Whenever I crack a witty comment around my oldest brother, he smiles and walks away. Once, when my sister’s husband, The Funny One, who works IT for AT&T and knows a lot about computers, had me throw out a computer that turned out to be perfectly good, I jokingly told my sister that her husband owes me a new computer. She seriously and sternly responded, “No, he doesn’t.” And in general, whenever I make a joke in front of my family, they briefly chuckle, then lean toward each other confused and whispering, “Is he serious?” He is The Serious One, after all. But my wife would totally disagree.
My wife has this problem, too, with her family. No one views her as The Funny One, despite that she’s incredibly funny at times. Although my wife is also known as The Angry One, which backfires on her plenty because when she turns into The Angry One, then people say, “Oh, yeah, now I see it. She is The Funny One.”
Recently, a reader of the paper ran into my father after reading my column about how I forgot to brew coffee into a mug and asked my dad if I’m as funny in real life as I am in the paper. He simply responded, “No, not as funny.”
And, referencing my column about how my wife told me I wasn’t being funny anymore in my columns, my mother-in-law flat-out said to my wife, after reading her column about not being able to make do without a couch, “Your column wasn’t that funny either.”
A popular thing to say to someone who doesn’t understand someone else’s humor is, “If you knew him, you’d find it funny.”
I think with me and my wife, it’s the opposite. With us, the statement should be: “If you didn’t know him/her, you’d find it funny.”
