Communication

Humor Me

I’ve written before about how conversation is the glue that holds our society together, but for some of us, it’s a difficult glue to manufacture. Every time I open my mouth, I’m appalled at what comes out of it: something I think I know but that I really don’t know, something I profess to feel but that I really don’t feel (because I have no idea how to translate real feelings into words), or something that may be accurate but is inappropriate to the situation. Ideally, I wouldn’t say any of these things if I had time to think about them first, but conversation doesn’t allow a lot of space for preprocessing. On occasions when I do have time to think about what I say before I say it, I usually conclude that I don’t have anything to say at all.

For these reasons, my usual conversational strategy is to ask a lot of questions, so that the other person can do most of the talking. Most people are all too happy to talk about themselves. But that sort of conversation can start to feel lopsided, so eventually the other person might respond with some questions about me. That’s a problem, because then I have to answer the questions. On the other hand, if they don’t ask anything about me, I feel insulted — so it’s a problem either way. You can see why I might be reluctant to engage in social situations.

(By the way, a sincere question to the people who read this: Are you happy with the things you hear coming out of your mouth? Or does the act of talking come so naturally to you that the question doesn’t arise?)

One way around this dilemma is humor. If someone is charming or funny or a good storyteller, I’m happy to spend time with them because there’s no need for me to hold up my end of the conversation. Whatever hurt I might feel about their lack of curiosity is made up for by the fact that they’re willing to entertain me so delightfully. For my part, if I can say something that’s genuinely witty, I don’t have to worry about whether it’s true or whether it expresses what I really think or feel. If I can make it amusing, I’m rewarded with the sense of engagement that comes with laughter.

I’ve always envied people who are naturally funny, who can say just the right thing at the right time, and do it in such a relaxed manner that nobody interprets it as trying to tell a joke. Debra and I are able to make each other laugh all the time, but I seem not to have that ability with anyone to whom I haven’t been married for 35 years.

When you’re a teacher standing in front of a room full of students, there’s always the temptation to try to be funny. I’m good at being clever, but it’s a big leap from cleverness to comedy. In my course on building websites, I’ve often said that labeling a link “Click here for info” is like labeling a light switch “Click here for light.” It’s a good way to make the point that “click here” adds nothing to a web page, but it’s not going to elicit laughter.

By contrast, there was a time when, in describing the difficulties of being a freelancer, I said, “I’ve been a contractor and I’ve been a client, and I can tell you from experience that all clients are idiots.” Everyone got a good chuckle out of that. But when I’ve repeated the same thing in other classes — which I’ve done way too many times — the response has always been blank stares. (Or worse, reproachful looks that translate to “Why would you say something so mean-spirited?”) Humor works best when it’s spontaneous, and the problem with spontaneity is that it can only happen once.

The one saving grace when a joke falls flat is that there is always one student who will shoot me a sympathetic glance, as if to say, “That was a really terrible joke, but thank you for trying!” That person usually ends up being my favorite student of the semester.

My attempts at classroom humor give me all the more respect for professional comedians, who are able to take well-worn material and make it funny every single night. I appreciate political humor by people like Jon Stewart or Bill Maher, but they fall more into the cleverness category — my response is usually admiration rather than out-and-out laughter. Performers who can make me laugh out loud are in a different category entirely. I remember years ago, when Don Rickles was in his prime, watching him do a set on the Tonight show and laughing helplessly even though I was the only person in the room. Until then, I would never have thought that was possible. There are comedians such as Greg Proops or Paula Poundstone who, when I attend their shows, can make me laugh so hard that I can’t breathe. That’s not just an amazing skill; it’s a public service.

Posted February 22, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Communication

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Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

Detail from the third of the “Hunt of the Unicorn” tapestries, 1495–1505

The question often comes up in late-night conversations with friends: Do you have any regrets about decisions you’ve made in your life? Even when taking into account the most unfortunate consequences I’ve faced for things I’ve done, my standard answer has always been, “No, since I don’t know what would have happened if I’d done otherwise. It might have been worse.”

That principle only goes so far, though. Although it allows me to feel comfortable with the general path my life has taken, it doesn’t eliminate the sting of tiny moments when, through selfishness or thoughtlessness or negligence, I’ve hurt someone else. How many times I’ve wished that I could hit the Stop button, rewind a bit, and redo the last few seconds!

My college roommate Jay once told me that I had “an overdeveloped sense of loss.” To the extent that’s true, it probably started on a spring day when I was a young child. My mother had never been a morning person — she was pretty much unapproachable until she’d had her coffee and put on her makeup. But on this one morning, she somehow woke up in a good mood. She emerged from her bedroom smiling, and remarked on how nice a day it was. She had a lightness that I’d never seen before.

I, meanwhile, had been privately working myself into a snit about some injustice I had suffered — something my sister had done to me, or some chore I’d been tasked with that I shouldn’t have had to do. Whatever the cause of my pique, seeing my mother so happy caused me to confront her with an aggrieved, whiny outburst. Her sunny aura vanished instantly, and she reverted to her usual morning grumpiness and irritation as she dealt with my complaint.

Immediately, I felt a huge wave of guilt and remorse. In killing her rare good mood, I felt like a murderer — like a hunter who had slaughtered a unicorn. But I was a child, not yet old enough to know how to back off and apologize, and so I continued to gripe and whine, even while seeing the damage I’d caused and knowing that it hadn’t been necessary.

I still grieve for that lost ray of sunshine. If “grieve” sounds like hyperbole, I have to assure you that it isn’t. Even though I’ve been able to forgive myself for the incident, the emotions associated with it are still fresh.

Another such moment occurred when I was in college. The feelings in this case are not as intense, but just as long-lasting.

It was a warm summer night, the kind in which the day’s oppressive humidity is relieved by a mild breeze, and clouds part to reveal the stars. Princeton has no classes during the summer, so the campus population was small: just a few grad students and those of us undergrads who had summer jobs. (I was working for the campus tour service.) There would be occasional evening activities at the graduate college, such as outdoor concerts and film showings. This was one of the latter — a showing of the classic “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” which I’d never seen and had long wanted to.

I liked to arrive early to such events, to find a good seat and get settled in. I found myself sitting near a young woman whom I’d never seen before. She and I began to chat, and in the fresh embrace of the summer air, I immediately felt at ease. Think of how rare those occasions are when you meet somebody and instantly hit it off — no self-consciousness, no posing. This was one of those occasions, where we felt each other’s warmth and delighted in each other’s openness. We didn’t talk once the film began to roll, but my enjoyment of it was acutely enhanced by having her nearby.

When the movie ended and we got up to go our separate ways, I wanted to tell her how much I enjoyed her company, and — perhaps — find a way to see her again. But how to find the words? “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you, Carol,” I said.

“Carol?” she replied, her eyes narrowing. “My name is Susan.”

Actually, I don’t know whether her name was Susan; I just made that part up. That’s the point — I remembered her as Carol, but I had it wrong. And that was the end of our rapport; the door slammed shut. I watched her walk off into the night.

Who knows whether anything would have come of that chance meeting? Summer nights have strange effects on people, and we might not have fallen under the same spell if we were to get together a second time. Maybe it’s best that the evening ended the way it did, with the pleasant memory of our brief time together.

But having called her by the wrong name in such a vulnerable atmosphere, I felt, and still feel, like I committed an act of violence. Not only did I insult her, but I had negligently put a sudden end to a precious moment of connection. From such small acts come the greatest regrets.

Posted December 8, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Communication

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Video Effects

I learned about video production by spending several days a week at my local cable TV station. The studio was run by one paid professional, while the rest of the crew consisted of community volunteers like me. Most of our output consisted of community-access programs for which each of us got to play a variety of roles: camera, switcher, floor manager, chyron, audio mixer, even onscreen talent. (My stint there also led, indirectly, to my meeting my wife, but that’s a story for another time.)

Although most of our work took place in the studio, we were occasionally sent out into the field to shoot community events. One such event was an arts fair that was set up in the parking lot of a shopping center. For its part in the fair, some resourceful theater group thought to stage a two-person play that took place in a laundromat, in an actual laundromat. The actors were miked, and the audience stood outside to watch the action through the plate-glass storefront.

“Let’s get some footage of that play,” said the director (the guy who ran the studio).

I was operating the camera, which in that era was a bulky, shoulder-mounted unit connected to a large video recorder carried in a backpack. I uncomfortably shoved my way to the front of the crowd in order to get an unobstructed shot.

“No,” he said. “You have to get closer.”

“I can’t,” I said. “If I get any closer, I’ll interfere with the performance.”

“We’re TV,” he snapped. “That’s what we do!” He grabbed the camera and backpack and barged into the laundromat, getting close shots of the actors as they did their best to pretend that he wasn’t there.

That’s when I first became uncomfortable with video. Clearly, once a camera moved from the studio into the real world, it couldn’t help but alter the events it was recording — and sometimes, take precedence over the events it was recording. These misgivings stayed with me for the nearly twenty subsequent years that I spent as a video producer.

Since the videos I produced (with the collaboration of my aforementioned wife, Debra) were intended for education and training, we rarely had to document events in real time. Pretty much everything we shot was staged for the camera. Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were dishonoring the people we were filming.

Because educational productions necessarily work on low budgets, we could rarely afford professional actors. All of the people we shot were playing versions of themselves. When we went into jails to shoot training videos for corrections personnel, we cast real inmates as inmates and real officers as officers. When we made a video for utility employees showing how the district responds to large-scale emergencies, we had actual workers and supervisors staffing a phony field operations center.

For the most part, nobody minded being put in front of the camera — particularly jail inmates, who relished the chance to get out of their daily routines. But I never felt good about asking a correctional officer to act out the process of disciplining an inmate, when that same officer and inmate have most likely had that interaction in real life. I was certainly not comfortable staging scenes of female employees being mistreated for use in a video about sexual harassment prevention, or people with disabilities encountering obstacles in a video explaining the Americans with Disabilities Act. The breaking point for me was when we were producing a public-awareness video for a homeless shelter, and I directed a real homeless family to act out their life on the street while we followed them with a camera.

All of these people were volunteers, and they knew what they were agreeing to do. The videos were intended for professional or public education, and therefore we could all rationalize that what we were doing was for a higher purpose. But that didn’t relieve me of the sense that I was demeaning real human beings by turning their lived experiences into fodder for the camera. That’s one of the reasons why I left the production field and went into teaching instead.

But let me end on a more positive note: There was one thing I loved about making these videos, which is that leading a video crew allowed me entrance into places where I never would have been otherwise. I got to put on a hard hat and orange vest and hang out with water-company workers in a ditch in the middle of a road. I got to spend time at a correctional boot camp, at a fiberglass factory in Kansas City, and behind the scenes at an advertising agency, a drug treatment center, and a credit-union bank. And on one memorable occasion, I got to stand on a rooftop and shout “Action!” to police officers down below who were about to stage a high-speed chase. I’d take experiences like those over sitting at a desk any day.

Posted September 14, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Communication

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Niceties

I have been known to have cause to say to my wife Debra, “The cat is not a toy.” And she has been known to respond, “Yes it is!” while continuing to swing the cat’s forelegs as if they were the arms of a dancing puppet.

The point is, Debra and I have different ways of relating to cats. For me, it’s all about respecting the cat’s innate dignity. When Mary Beth, a gray-brown tabby with a long and elegant tail, comes to me for affection, I’ll generally stroke her head and back, scratch under her chin, and rub her belly if she asks me to. When she’s in Debra’s hands, I’m as likely as not to see Mary Beth’s ears being held back to make her look like a rodent, as she protests (in Debra’s imitation cat voice), “Dat’s not diggified!”

I must quickly say that none of this hurts Mary Beth, who is a very patient cat. Debra loves animals and would do nothing to cause them pain. She just feels that there’s no point in having cats in the house if you can’t have fun with them. I, on the other hand, am the sort of person who says “Excuse me” if I have to maneuver around a cat who’s in my way.

As you might expect, our contrasting ways of dealing with cats reflect our ways of interacting with the world. If a house is for sale in our neighborhood, Debra has no problem with touring the house even though she has no intention of buying it; I worry that I’d be wasting the real estate agent’s time under false pretenses. If we’re walking through a narrow residential alley in China, I’ll be careful to keep my eyes forward so as not to accidentally see into anyone’s window. Debra, while not actively peering through the glass, believes that whatever she happens to catch a glimpse of as we walk by is fair game.

For the most part, we’re tolerant of and accustomed to each other’s styles. I will cringe at some of Debra’s behavior, and she will roll her eyes at some of mine, but neither of us will start an argument about it. The only time I can remember Debra seriously objecting to my conduct was when we were racing through an airport to catch a soon-to-depart connecting flight, and I was repeatedly stopping to let people go by. Debra told me, in an unmistakable tone of anger and frustration, to stop doing that.

The surprising thing — and one of the reasons why our marriage has lasted as long as it has — is that our styles of behavior complement each other. Neither one is clearly superior; sometimes Debra’s way is effective, and sometimes mine is.

The first place we lived in together was the ground floor of a house whose upper story had been converted into an apartment. Our upstairs neighbors were a pair of young women whose favorite activity, at the end of a long work week, was to invite a pile of friends over, play loud music, and drink and dance. The thunder of footsteps above us was deafening, and I often found myself having to climb the stairs late at night to ask them to tone it down. As you might expect, that didn’t sit well with them, and our relationship deteriorated into simmering antagonism.

Finally, I had an inspiration. Debra and I had made plans to go away for a weekend, and so I told our neighbors, “We’re going out of town, so this would be a really great time to have a party.” They were pleasantly surprised to be told this, and sure enough, they had a no-holds-barred party while were away. This happened a few more times, and we were pleased to see that they gradually made more of an effort to be quieter on the nights when we were home.

One day, one of the women came to tell me that her roommate’s birthday was coming up, and that they really wanted to celebrate with a big blowout. Would we be willing to go away that weekend? That was a major thing to ask, and she knew it, but we so appreciated her sincerity that we said, “Yes, we’ll find someplace to go.” We went away, they had their party, and from that time on we became friends. This is my favorite example of how instead of meeting resistance with anger, it’s often more effective to meet resistance with niceness.

On the other hand, sometimes it isn’t. When I was having a wisdom tooth removed under sedation in an oral surgeon’s office, my blood pressure suddenly dropped to a life-threateningly low level. The surgeon had to abort the operation, and I was rushed by ambulance to the emergency room. Because it wasn’t clear why this had happened (and because having a wisdom tooth removed when you’re in your 60s is a much bigger deal than when you’re in your 20s), the surgeon was reluctant to attempt the procedure again. He suggested instead that I have it done under general anesthesia in a hospital setting, where they’d be prepared for anything that might go wrong.

We found an oral surgeon who had admitting privileges at a Kaiser hospital (Kaiser Permanente being our healthcare provider), and he tried to set a date for the operation. But to the surprise of all of us, Kaiser turned him down, saying that there was no medical reason to use an operating room for a wisdom tooth extraction. Debra (who, incidentally, was once a lawyer) appealed the decision, submitting affidavits from a variety of medical professionals saying that there was indeed a medical reason — namely, that I had almost died the first time. Still, Kaiser denied the appeal.

At this point, I was ready to back down. Maybe it really wasn’t medically necessary; maybe the blood-pressure drop was just a fluke and I should try again to have the procedure done in the oral surgeon’s office. Maybe I just shouldn’t have the wisdom tooth removed at all. But Debra would have none of it. She pursued this case with various Kaiser representatives, making herself into the world’s worst pain in the ass and refusing to leave them alone until they reversed their decision. They finally did, a full year later — and even then, they refused to concede that use of the operating room was medically necessary. They said that they were permitting it “as a courtesy,” meaning that they were doing it just so they no longer had to put up with Debra. So sometimes it doesn’t pay to be nice, and I’m happy to still be alive to admit it. After that, I can’t really complain when she does funny things to the cat.

Posted January 12, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Communication

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Open Mind

Sometime in the mid-1960s, I started seeing commercials for a new fast-food chain called Kentucky Fried Chicken. The chicken, prepared according to Colonel Sanders’s secret recipe using eleven herbs and spices, was unbearably tempting. I could practically smell it coming out of the TV screen.

I asked my mother whether we could get Kentucky Fried Chicken sometime, and her response was absolutely not. “It’s expensive, and it’s bad for you,” she said. So it wasn’t until I was in high school, when I was able to go places on my own and had a bit of money to spend, that I finally got to buy myself some of that long-anticipated chicken.

Needless to say, the chicken was terrible. It was salty and greasy, and it left my stomach feeling unsettled. I was extremely let down, but I chalked it up to a learning experience. “OK, now I know,” I said to myself.

But the story gets worse: A week later, I saw another commercial for Kentucky Fried Chicken, beautifully fried to a golden brown and oozing herbs and spices, and I wanted the chicken again. Not only that, I went out and bought the chicken again. That’s when I realized how insidious advertising can be, particularly when it’s accompanied by seductive visual images — it can bypass all of your logic and common sense and go straight to the infantile “I need it!” portion of your brain. That was scary as hell.

I’m not opposed to advertising in principle. Up through the 1950s, advertisements were mostly informative. They made you aware that a product exists and then made a rational argument for why you should buy it. I’m not saying that the argument was necessarily good — cigarette commercials would talk about the smoothness of their blend of tobacco and the effectiveness of their filter, without bothering to mention that smoking those cigarettes would kill you — but at least they called upon the customer’s ability to reason. They were accompanied by appealing images, but those images served as sugar to help the medicine go down. The ads themselves were still mostly medicine.

But advertisements now are not intended to persuade; they’re intended to capture you against your will, using whatever new psychological techniques the researchers have cooked up. Not only do current TV commercials say very little about the merits of their product; some of them don’t even mention the product until the final title card. They use carefully crafted imagery to get your neurons all tingly, and then cap off the experience by giving you a brand name to associate with that tingliness. No matter how much of a rational thinker you are, there’s nothing you can do about it.

I try to defend myself by avoiding advertisements as much as possible. I scrupulously ignore the ads in my Facebook feed, and avert my eyes from any ads I encounter in newspapers and magazines. But that sort of defense doesn’t go very far. Even when you don’t encounter ads firsthand, they seep into the culture and get at you through your social interactions. I stopped watching TV some time ago, yet somehow I still know who “Jake from State Farm” is.

So really, the only thing I can do is actively counteract the effects of advertising — meaning that if I see a product advertised, I vow not to buy it. If I see a ballot proposition heavily advertised, I make it a point to vote for the other side. Naturally, there exceptions to this policy: If good, objective, reliable sources can convince me that the thing being advertised really is better than the alternatives, then I might go for it. But my default position is to say no, and the burden of proof is on the party who wants to convince me otherwise. This may seem like an extreme reaction, but it’s the only one that makes sense to me. Somebody is paying for access to my brain, which in itself isn’t a good thing; but on top of that, the person to whom that payment is being made isn’t me. I didn’t have a voice when that deal was made. Some agency is renting out the inside of my head as if it’s real estate, and so it’s up to me to bar the door and defend my private property. You see, even all of these years later, I still crave KFC, and that’s horrifying.

Posted January 5, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Communication

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Humor Me

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few

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Open Mind

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