What Did You Learn
About Funny from Your Family?
© 2015 by Joyce Mason
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What hanging out with
my funny Mom felt like.
I thought we’d close
Humor Month with a reflection on what you’ve learned about funny from your
family.
In addition to a humor style suggested by your natal chart,
your parents’ funny bones influence yours profoundly. It’s like your natal
chart is your laughter DNA, but your parents’ charts (and those of siblings or
other live-in relatives) constitute your humor environment. Even though you
come from the same family, you may be wired differently for funny. It might
have been easy or difficult to develop your true sense of humor, depending on
how your humor signature fits theirs. There are aspects of your “home humor”
that you might want to keep—others that you may be happy to trash. For
instance, in one branch of my family (luckily not immediate), snarky and rather
mean-spirited humor is a mainstay. I’d trash that in a heartbeat.
But first, I recommend forgetting the astrology of it all
and just taking a journey back in time to your family’s overall humor style and
the most hilarious moments that stand out in your memory. There’s a reason for starting
on Earth before tapping the sky. We often get too much into our heads during
Astro-analysis. It’s much easier to count on our visceral memories to hand us
the highlights. Then we can look at where our family humor lies astrologically
and what parts of it are keepers or tossers. I’ll model the exercise to show
what I mean.
One of the most sterling qualities my mom possessed was her
ability to laugh at herself. She taught me not to take myself too seriously.
Later, when I found my birth mother, I realized that learning to laugh at
myself is something I would have never experienced in my biological family. My
birth mom took herself way too seriously, and she rarely lightened up to see
the ironies in her behavior and the funniest aspects of her foibles.
My mom taught me how to laugh at myself. My dad taught me timing and how to insert dry wit into just the right pause in a conversation.
My dad, on the other hand, had a sense of timing that was
just uncanny. He used it to insert his dry-wit comments into a conversation
into just the right pause. Sometimes he was so funny; I still laugh out loud at
some of his most memorable comedic moments. His humor was as understated as my
mom’s was exaggerated.
Mom Humor. There
were other hallmarks of my parents’ humor. My mom was deaf in one ear and
refused to wear her hearing aid. Therefore, she heard things in a very original
way. The result was non-stop malapropisms. If you’re old enough to know my
references, think Norm Crosby or Archie Bunker. She misconstrued her words
because she was repeating them the way she heard them—garbled.
One of my faves was when we were on vacation in Wisconsin,
back in the days of roadside burn barrels at rest stops. After our picnic
lunch, she told my dad to throw the garbage in that “insinuator.” She thought I
went to university on a college “canvas” and that my cousin took up “scoop
diving.” When aggravated with my niece’s pediatrician, Mom declared, These damn doctors take their oats under
false pretenses. I wondered if they also took their hay.
It ran in her family. My Aunt Ginny, mom’s sister,
thought the stream that ran through town was a “cricket” and that the great
dancer’s name was Fred Aster. Uncle Finny, Mom’s brother, wanted a Buke and a
bunk in Skoke. (Translation: a Buick and a bungalow in Skokie, a suburb of
Chicago.) He still talked 50 years later like he just got off the boat from
Italy.
When pearls of this original lingo dropped into the
conversation, they often caused paroxysms of laughter. Mom would laugh with us,
not wanting to miss the fun and not getting insulted that we found her “off”
words amusing. It was hopeless to tell her the correct pronunciation of the
word she was trying to approximate. It would just come out with a new twist
next time. The King became a phenomenon when my sisters and I were broaching
our early teens. Mom thought his name was Elvie, and she was always telling us
to turn down the rock ‘n’ roll—but she called it bing, bang, boom.
Mom usually overreacted to things. Hard telling what to
blame for that. Plenty of planets in Scorpio, an Aries Moon and being 100%
Italian are all contenders. It was so easy to get a rise out of her; it’s a
good thing she could take a joke and
laugh at herself. Teenage friends of the family were forever pranking her. My
favorite family mischief was blowing up a picture of her into a poster. She was
wearing a huge sombrero, playing her nephew’s guitar, hiked on her knee resting
on a footstool, after she had sniffed a cork and was quite tipsy. (That’s all
it took.) We pinned it to the sheers on Christmas Eve. After all the presents
were opened, we had the “unveiling.” We drew the outer curtains open, and I can
still remember how she jumped back and hollered, “Where the hell did you get
that thing! How did you make it so big?” Within seconds she was laughing with
everyone else, getting the audience perspective on her Kodak moment. She was
priceless.
One of my earliest memories of Mom Meets Malapropism is not
one I recall consciously but via a story she told countless times during my
life. Both my parents were gismo junkies. If some new do-dad promised to make
life easier, they were first in line to get one. Naturally, our family was an
early owner of one of the original black-and-white televisions. When flipping
through the three grainy channels that existed in the late 1940s, I apparently
saw “How-Do-Ya-Doody” and got so excited; I stood on my head. I was about a
year and a half old. Considering that back then “doody” was a euphemism for #2
(maybe still?), I think we’re back to my last post, Looking
for Laughs in Your Natal Jupiter, and one of the least desirable
expressions of my Jupiter in Scorpio.
Dad Humor. I’ll share two stories from Dad’s Greatest
Lines, and I think you’ll get the whole picture. Aunt Ginny was a very
large-busted woman who would strike a movie starlet pose, shoulders back and
chest popping, every time someone mentioned an interesting (or especially
available) man. She was a divorcee on the hunt who had a special interest in
doctors.
Some handsome man came up at the dinner table one weekend,
and Ginny said, “Oh, yeah?” begging to hear more. Her kneejerk, bra-size
inflating gesture was more pronounced than usual. After two beats, Dad said,
“You’d better be careful, Ginny. If one of those gets loose; it’ll kill us
all.”
Then there was the time as adults that our entire family was
into tropical fish. We were at my brother Don’s apartment, waiting for him to
put the finishing touches on getting ready so we could all go out to dinner.
Mom was scrutinizing his fish tank. She noticed more than one plecostomus and
several other ground-eater fish. In her typical dramatic tone, as though the
thought was truly offensive, she said to my dad (as if he should do something
about it), “Why does he have so many catfish?”
Two beats. “One does floors; the others do windows.”
Parental Jupiters and
Other Astro Stuff. I suspect Mom’s
ability to laugh at herself is a product of her Jupiter in Sag trine North Node
in Aries. She also had Aries Moon (wide trine). If learning about Self was part
of her mission this time ‘round (1912-1980), having Jupiter stoking that
continuously would surely result in a good sense of humor about herself.
Dad’s Jupiter was in Scorpio, conjunct my Chiron by less
than a degree. (The chart interactions between me and my adoptive parents are
uncanny, starting with Dad’s Venus within seconds of my Sun.) Certainly, the
Aunt Ginny improv was Scorpionic humor at its best—and the aquarium joke proves
he knew, intuitively, that he had his humorous in a water sign.
What made mom malaprop is up for grabs from an astrological
perspective, but I tend to think it has something to do with the out-of-sign
trine of Neptune to her Moon (26 Cancer to 1 Aries). Neptune confuses, and if
she couldn’t hear well, she was feeling her way through a lot of conversations.
No wonder they sometimes came out like someone trying to talk underwater—while
scoop diving.
Parent-Child Humor
Mix. Obviously, I developed a sense of humor much like my dad’s since we
share the same Jupiter sign. We also both have planets in Virgo (Sun for me,
Venus and Mercury for him). That tends to sharpen wordplay, words being the
medium Virgo loves. Lastly, he’s got a lot of Saturn aspects and I have Cap
Moon. There’s the tune-in to timing. I resonated to his humor for all kinds of
astrological reasons. He was a lovable double Leo that a Saturn square subdued
but did not conquer. He still managed to be the King of Hearts, despite being
surrounded by women—even female pets. His rule was subtle and there’d be no
missing his solar and lunar warmth.
I’ve never been as naturally adept as my mom at laughing at
myself (genetics there from birth mom?), though I get better at it with every
passing year. The lightness of Marymom’s Sag humorous gave me something to
strive for to counterbalance my Jupiter in Scorpio that can go dark easily. The
fact that the hallmark of Mom’s humor involved words—I wouldn’t call it
wordplay, more like wordkill—endeared her to me. I often say I became a writer
to protect the words she mangled.
Your Turn. As I’m sure you can see, this exercise is
really entertaining and can tell you a lot about your family’s sense of humor
and how you fit into the dynamic of it—or don’t. Like everything in life,
becoming our authentic self is still the most important yet most difficult
thing we can do. This goes for your sense of humor, too.
As a finishing touch to this conversation, think about a
catchphrase you’d use—a few words—to describe your unique brand of humor. I’ve
been using mine for some time to describe my writing, but it also applies to my
humorous. I call my trademark depth insights
with humor.
~~~
Photo Credit: ©
Matthew Cole - Fotolia.com
Postscript:
I had no intention of writing two new articles this
month in the middle of our Radical Reposts. There are few things I love more
than humor, and it surprises me that I always have something more to say about
it. I’ll always make time for laugh therapy.
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