It occurred to me today that humor is something that we learn.

My son just told me a joke that wasn’t funny. And, as I often do when he tells me a joke that’s not funny, I rolled my eyes and I thought to myself about his sense of humor.

I suppose it likes most things: the more you work at it, the better you get. So, if your average day or week or month of human experience is going to have in it an average number of attempts by people at being funny/telling jokes/getting others to laugh, then as time goes by, forty year olds are going to be funnier, on average, than six year olds, and neither of those groups of people are going to be as funny as your average senior citizen.

And, as with most things, there are going to be people who work at improving harder than others. Michael Jordan was, when he retired for the last time in 2003, one of the greatest players to ever play the game. He was about forty at the time. I’m forty-four, four years older than Michael was back then, and I’m not nearly as good. I think I have played in three actual basketball games in my entire life –> that might have something to do with it.

So, the passage of time improves us, just as water wears at the edges of a stone, gradually and with a patience that puts most people to shame. But, concerted effort also improves us, for those who don’t have the time or the patience to wait. You could wait for the water to smooth the stone, or you could take a file or some sandpaper to that stone, or a hammer and a chisel.

Back to the question of humor, comedians are the professionals in the ‘sport’, and their concerted effort makes them funnier than the average person. They try jokes in front of people and those jokes succeed or fail, and the comedian is paying attention to that data, to be able to tailor a set of jokes that really has them rollin’ in the aisles. As they do this work, they come to understand things about delivery and timing and knowing your audience. Because comedians know things about being funny that your average human doesn’t understand, they’d have a greater chance at being really funny, I would think, than those who just don’t fully understand.

Jokes about social media are going to flop in a nursing home, and jokes about retirement planning are going to backfire in a TikTok video.

However, aside from the people who work really hard at designing a comedy routine, there are some people who are funnier than others, even when you account for things like learning or planning. Could it be that there’s a talent involved here, like there is with so many things where learning is involved?

Maybe, like so many things, our children pick up from us –their parents– some abilities because they observe us doing certain things. I have a cousin who is good with cars, and when we were kids, he was always next to his father, my uncle, working on and paying attention to cars. My children have watched my wife and me as we exercise our musical skills, and they have, each of them in their own way, excelled in music to different extents.

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Not to stray from the subject for very long, but I’ve often wondered about this question of talent vs. training and the combination of these two things that you find in the most capable of people in whatever field or discipline you might chose to focus on. Is the greatest brain surgeon the one with eight thousand hours of brain surgery experience or the one with the rock solid hands that don’t ever more a millimeter with his consent? Can you teach steady hands? Can you have enough skill to make training unnecessary?

In psychology class, my students would understand this as the question of nature vs. nurture. We have certain things that are naturally handed to us, in our genetics, while we have other things that we receive from exposure to certain environments in our lives. The son of the NBA superstar might get his father’s genes, resulting in him growing to an adult height of 6’9″, but he will probably also pick up on some things as he sits in the bleachers watching his dad in his practice sessions.

Along these same lines, I wonder if talent is actually a myth. I wonder whether or not it’s actually an illusion that anyone has ever been successful doing something really well that they didn’t work really hard to succeed at doing. Have we ever documented someone who is totally capable of something that everyone else has had to work at, and that person has exactly zero hours of experience or practice?

Bob Ross, talented artist, once said, “Talent is pursued interest. Anything that you are willing to practice, you can do.”

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I expect that my son will eventually get better at being funny. If he doesn’t have an innate talent –which would seem unlikely at this point–he’ll at least get better through the process of practice and learning. It’s important to note that this process –> the process by which all of us tend to get better at things over time when we continue to work at improvement –> this process is called progress.

I’ve written several blog posts over the past few months about getting better at things, about making improvements, about being about the business of advancement. It’s unfortunately the case that I, only recently, have discovered that, for many years, I squandered my time, not really doing my best to move forward in being the best person that I can be.

How’s that for not funny?