We have forgotten how to laugh in our society and I mean that good old belly laugh with tears running down our cheeks leaving us gasping for air.
I’m going to use an old joke from the pre-political correctness era as an example of why I just can’t fit in with this political correctness agenda. Are you ready to be mortified? You might be so mortified that you’ll spring into action and text the political correctness police.
You see there was this very nice young man who unfortunately had a wooden eye which made him very self-conscious. He was attending a dance with his friends who were encouraging him to ask a girl to dance.
The young boy was struggling to gather the courage to make his move.
A cute young girl was sitting alone on a bench. She too was very shy and self-conscious because she suffered with a harelip. However she was wishing so badly that someone would ask her to dance.
Finally the boy’s friends convinced him to approach the young girl and ask her to dance. They assured him that she would not be offended by his wooden eye.
So the very nervous young lad approached the young girl and shyly asked, “Would you like to dance with me?”
The excited young girl leaped to her feet and shouted, “Would I! (translated wood eye) which resulted in the young man pointing at the young girl shouting, “Harelip, harelip!”
The result was no dancing that evening. 🙁
That concluded the politically incorrect joke which thirty-five years ago would have resulted in peals of laughter. The laughter would not have been the result of a wooden eye or a harelip but the misunderstanding of the “wood eye!” response.
Recently at our morning coffee session at Subway I told that joke except I made a slight error and gave the boy the harelip and the girl the wooden eye. So when I got to the punch line I got mostly confused looks and some polite laughter.
The following day my coffee mates questioned me about the joke. They had all been thinking about it for the last twenty-four hours trying to make sense out of it.
I retold the joke successfully this time and then the raucous laughter began. But again it had nothing to do with the harelip or wooden eye but the misunderstanding of the excited “Would I!” response.
We are missing that freedom to laugh and I miss that as I have spent most of my life trying to make people do just that – laugh.
Political correctness has made us all hesitant and unsure of how we are to speak. It has taken the fun out of conversation and limited healthy laughter.
Would I dare tell the ‘wood eye, harelip’ joke in public in today’s society? In fact I just did in this blog and hopefully no one was offended.
As I think about it I pulled off a politically incorrect move way back in 1976 in an attempt to extract laughter from several hundred prom students, teachers and their spouses. I was way ahead of my time. But because politically correctness hadn’t been invented yet my talk was deemed highly successful and provided a fun evening filled with much laughter.
It was always a tradition at Wheaton High School proms that a guest speaker was a part of the festivities.
I can still remember when those two prom committee students asked me if I would be the speaker that year.
Panic set in immediately! What could I possibly say to a room filled with dozens of students, their dates and faculty members and their spouses?
And then I thought about the George Gobel television variety show. During one of his many skits he would occasionally take out his old diary and read things he had written in the diary from many years earlier in his life.
So I pretended to have discovered my old diary from my high school years which described my tragic junior year prom experience.
My brother Tom was a senior and was dating the cutest and most popular girl in the school. I had no girlfriend at the time so my Mother convinced me that I should ask my classmate Mary Anne.
Since our family had only one car that meant Tom and his ‘hot’ date and Mary Anne and I would be double dating. My brother was not happy having his little brother in the back seat chaperoning his final high school prom with the most popular girl in the high school! 🙁
My diary described the whole process starting with me calling Mary Anne on the phone and nervously asking her to go to the prom.
The diary made known that Mary Anne was plump…..well okay I believe the word I might have used was fat. Political correctness may have had its beginning at that very moment. 🙁
The diary presentation was very successful and the audience laughed uproariously.
But then the political correctness guilt kicked in. As I sat down after mentioning my slightly overweight prom date from 1962 I looked around at the beautifully attired young ladies and realized that some of those young ladies were also slightly overweight.
Had I hurt their feelings? Had I just invented political correctness?
I never received any nasty phone calls or threatening notes so as far as I know I didn’t destroy any young ladies self- esteem. If anything maybe the diary reading inspired them to go on a crash diet and their health was improved even to this day. 🙂
I can only hope.
I only wish our society could get over our hypersensitivity for what we say. Let’s get back to laughter and quit analyzing every statement for possible political incorrectness!
If a news reporter came up to me on the street, aimed his camera at me and asked me if I would like to get rid of our nation’s new found sensitivity to speech I would know exactly how to answer.
“Wood eye?” would be my enthusiastic reply. 🙂
Until next time.
