Learning Experience 1

              Trying to come up with a learning experience can be hard. Not because I lack them, but because I have so many of them daily. For this learning experience, I decided to do what any young person living in the twenty-first century would do. I began to surf the web. I typed in humor into my Tumblr search bar. As I scrolled, all I seemed to find were dumb memes that related to small groups of people and a bunch of random pictures of cats doing funny things. None of these helped me come up with a valid learning experience. I finally scrolled past something worthwhile, a quote from Charlie Chaplin the king of slapstick comedy. Chaplin once said, “My pain may be the reason for somebody’s laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody’s pain.” I believe that Chaplin’s moto exemplifies what it means to be a true comedian and relates well to what we have discussed in class. A comedian in many ways is someone who sacrifices a part of themselves to bring joy to others. In Chaplin’s case, he sacrificed his safety and willingly humiliated himself to put a smile on people’s faces. Some comedians risk making fools of themselves to get people to laugh. I personally think that risking a part of yourself is a much more honorable form of comedy than just simply putting people down and risking someone else’s reputation for a laugh. When I started discerning between “honorable” comedy and “dishonorable” comedy, I stopped finding the offensive humor funny. I see offensive humor now as just a lack of effort and an easy route to getting a few laughs that tears people apart on the way there. I believe people should be selective about humor. What people find funny says a lot about their character. I pride myself on my sense of humor and I respect people who have different senses of humor. Humor makes this world diverse. A true comedian obviously wants people to find them funny, but what they really want is for people to relate and find importance in their deeper message. Comedians do not put their honor on the line to simply get laughs, they put their honor on the line as a way to share a part of themselves, their beliefs, and their pain. We should honor true comedians and laugh not because everyone else is laughing but because what they had to say struck a note in our heads. Now the pain a comedian puts forth may come from a darker place and we see comedians that battle depression all the time. I find this relationship between sadness and laughter fascinating and I am planning on going to go more into depth on it in another entry. However, for now, I try to remember that comedians are people too and that there is a difference between comedians who let people laugh at their pain and comedians who laugh at other people’s pain