April 1st — aka "April Fools Day" — winds to a close.
I've pretty much ignored the day, choosing instead to focus on today marking the start of a new quarter: Time to close out the previous 3-month period and make some plans and goals for the second quarter.
April flowers...
I admit it, I am fairly guided by this construct we call "time.
I never liked April Fools Day, perhaps because I spent most of my life around various pretty "severe" practical jokers who felt the day was not an opportunity for a few pranks and jokes, but an opportunity to spread humiliating embarrassment and bullying on a day where they could actually get away with saying "It's just a JOKE! Don't you have a sense of humor???"
Maybe my sense of humor is lacking, but I just don't think there's anything very funny about having your bicycle thrown off a bridge into 40 feet of water "as a joke."
I also struggled to find the humor in having my school bag filled with some choice pig manure while I was playing soccer during recess... that not only stank but ruined all my books to the point of having to be replaced, along with the bag, itself.
Some kids are just... nasty.
It didn't take me very long to develop some "intense illness" every April 1st so I could give school a complete miss on that day.
In retrospect, I have gotten to thinking that the things that happened to me on April Fools' Day were weird, because I was actually a pretty lousy victim: Generally emotionless and non-reactive. Maybe the "challenge" was to see if they could get me to lose my cool.
They failed.
I only "lost it" once, while in lower and middle school... and that was not in connection with April 1st. The result was my beating the snot out of a feared school bully two grades above mine... and I kept beating on him long past the point where he'd given up and capitulated. The only thing I wanted for him (in the moment) was DEATH.
Pretty much everybody cut me a very wide path, after that. Not because I was powerful, but because I was clearly crazy.
But getting back to "a sense of humor," I guess what the years have taught me is that the things I find genuinely funny are typically "victimless." Humor that is "at the expense of" someone just hasn't ever sat well with me; nor has humiliation or injury.
But hey, that's just me.
And right now, the clock in the lower right corner of my screen reads 11:58pm and by the time I post this I'll re-emerge from my annual "hibernation." In general, April is one of my favorite months of the year because nature comes back to life... and we start gardening!
Thanks for reading, and I hope your day was a good one!
How about YOU? What kind of humor do you like? Do you think practical jokes that clearly have a "victim" are funny? Does bullying disguised as "humor" make it more acceptable? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20210402 00:12 PDT
0230/1473
Sheesh! sounds like if you lived some pretty Mad Max danish "April Fools Days" right? LoL
Go no farther! I'm sure and I bet that was the only motivation. :)
Poor feared school bully. He never thought that to be truly crazy, you only have to have a ton of sense of humor. Hahahaha
One of my best defenses was always playing the "crazy clown" role... insanity makes people far more uneasy and hesitant than force or violence.
Oh yeah! In my youth I had a couple of good friends who were very good playing the "crazy clown" role.
Pretty effective to avoid violence if you ask me. LoL
You beating up a bully as a kid put a smile to my face, not that violence is funny but that I think you did the right thing. Not to say that we should run around beating up bullies all day. I'm generally against violence.
But I prefer the kind of humor that is not Three Stooges in being just slap-stick where people get hurt and you laugh at them instead of with them. I prefer more nerd humor or geek humor, like sophisticated logic humor or silly crazy humor.
I'm just generally not into violence; I've generally believed in the idea that "violence begets more violence" never ends up solving anything.
Did I do the right thing? Maybe... that guy mostly left me alone, or he only came near me when he was with 2-3 of his other friends.
The only thing that might have been better than beating up the bully would be in having the confidence to try to calmly talk sense into him every once in a while, to try to counsel him in a sense, etc.
So, of course there are better long-term approaches if you're able to be like a friend to the bully, but there is also a higher probability of risk in attempting to help the bully. In the short-run, beating up a bully solves a problem temporarily.
I say it depends on the variables and I would try my best not to fight back kind of thing. Beating up a person can escalate the problem like you said, like he could have tried to start a new fight with you with his friends.
I believe in violence but I also believe in more long-term approaches at the same time which should be emphasized upon most of the time. I know some if not most bullies do things in order to get certain types of reactions and responses.
People should try not to give the bullies what they want. Don't let it get to you, don't let it bother you.
I've encountered bullies as a kid. I remember one kid during high school and he was bothering me at times and I didn't fight back. Other teens told me they thought I should have done something and I said no basically.
I guess for the most part, I believe in self-defense in a life or death situation where a person is about to kill a baby or something very bad like with a gun, a knife, or anything that appears potentially dangerous and immediate, then you step in kind of thing. Anything less than that should be resisted and procrastinated against.
Sample "April Fools" joke: "For the first time ever, scientists found x-rays coming out your anus." Laughs manically and farts. "In my case it's probably mostly the hydrogen sulfide gas that gives it that special bouquet."
And that is funny... and I definitely appreciate that!