Yes, I’m a Humorist. Here’s Why You Don’t Know What That is

A young person asked me this week what exactly a humorist is.

Not in a philosophical, late-night-dorm-room way. Not as a challenge. Just an honest question. The kind of question you ask when you’ve maybe heard a word before, but never actually seen it in the wild.

And I realized something unsettling (to me, anyway): there are probably quite a few people reading this column who don’t really know what a humorist is either.

Including, occasionally, my dear wife Honey Doodle, who is usually highly supportive of my endeavors.

She will sometimes read my column, look up from her phone, and say something like, “I’m not really sure what the point of this is.” I sigh, read through it again, trying to read it through her eyes (no, gentlemen, I do not do this very well,) and make sure it is written correctly. But the truth is, sometimes she’s going to miss the point. Sometimes you are. The art of satirical writing is that the point is often obscured until you’re ready to hear it — assuming that the humorist has been able to communicate the point they are trying to make — which is admittedly, sometimes a longshot.

So let’s start with the basics.

A humorist is not a comedian.

A comedian tells jokes. A humorist makes observations. A comedian wants you to laugh at the punchline. A humorist wants you to laugh and then feel slightly uncomfortable about why you’re laughing.

Traditionally, the humorist was the person at the newspaper whose job was to step back from the day’s events and say, “Are we sure this makes sense?”

Not from the left. Not from the right. From the outside.

The great humorists weren’t partisan warriors. They were professional eyebrow-raisers.

Oscar Wilde did it with manners and manners alone.

Mark Twain did it with rivers, politicians, and the deeply suspicious nature of human intelligence.

Dave Barry did it with exploding appliances and Florida.

Lewis Grizzard did it with Southern culture, football, and the quiet understanding that none of us are as smart as we think we are.

Douglas Adams did it by explaining that the universe is vast, meaningless, and mostly run by people who probably shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

And if you go back far enough, you’ll notice that America’s first humorist is someone whose quotes and writings you’re more familiar with than any of the above-mentioned names, Poor Richard himself, Benjamin Franklin.

What all of them had in common was not politics. It was perspective.

As you may have noticed, this column is not political commentary. I have readers on the right and readers on the left, and both groups seem equally convinced that I am secretly working for the other side.

That is not an accident. That is the point.

Humorists deal in social commentary. We look at people, systems, habits, traditions, and trends and say, “This is strange, right?”

Sometimes we use humor. Sometimes we use absurdity. Sometimes we exaggerate just enough to make the truth visible.

A good humor column doesn’t tell you what to think. It invites you to notice.

Which is why this is a lost art.

We have lost the humorist because we have become too polarized. Everything is now a loyalty test. If you point out something ridiculous, someone immediately demands to know which team you’re on. The correct answer is apparently never, “I just noticed something utterly absurd.”

We’ve also become less self-aware. Humorists rely on your ability to look at yourself, your political party, your social group, your own left foot in the mirror, and laugh. That requires humility. Humility has been removed from the curriculum.

We’ve become less educated, or at least less comfortable with nuance. Satire without nuance is just yelling. Irony now requires a footnote and a legal disclaimer. Nuance and subtlety go hand in hand. Part of the problem with our society is most of our countrymen would be hard-pressed to define either word.

And we’ve become too busy. We scroll, react, rage, and move on. Reflection takes time. Absurdity only reveals itself when you slow down long enough to notice that you’re standing in it.

A society without humorists is a society that takes itself very seriously right up until it walks into a glass door.

Which is why humorists matter.

The humorist is not here to win arguments. The humorist is here to remind you that we are human, fallible, occasionally ridiculous, and deeply in need of being able to laugh at ourselves.

That is not frivolous. That is essential.

And if you ever find yourself reading this column and thinking, “I don’t get the point,” that may actually mean it’s working.

Now you know what a humorist is. If you’d like to support this valuable work in a small way, you can buy my new book, Principles Are Like Pants… You Ought to Have Some. It’s jam-packed with this same type of societal observation.