Back when I was at Emory, I wrote several humorous op-ed pieces for our school newspaper…all Emory-specific stuff. Not one of them got published. The editor always told me this needed to be refined, or that wasn't clear, or this needed to be more structured, blah blah blah BULLSHIT. His comments were always thinly veiled attempts at saying, “This is just too weird. Can't you write something uber-mainstream?” It was frustrating, but maybe he was right: the majority of people on our campus couldn't spot humor if it was graffitied onto the quad.
So, senior year, I gave it one last shot. I submitted the following piece to our school newspaper. I won't even tell you if it got published or not.
This May, I’m graduating from a university that has no sense of humor. Don’t laugh, it’s true. Even if it was wildly false and laced with nitrogen oxide, would you laugh anyway?
To think that humor at Emory remains so pent up in a black hole of squirming wit, wriggling helplessly against itself to break free, is like picturing the toilet seat cover being prematurely sucked out from underneath me by one of those hyperactive electronic sensors as I start to sit down. And if you don’t know what that’s like, good for me, our toilet seats are still somewhat sanitary, and my analogies are still painfully diluted.
I don’t care much about Emory. I may respect it as a person, or at least as a collective of girls, and I may make out with it every now and then, but its “too cool for school” attitude leaves me with a bitter taste. Emory, have you been smoking again? You taste like cigarettes. Sorry, the black humor is killing me.
It’s ironic that our own school humor magazine, The Spoke (for the many of you who never actually read it) is one of the best humor magazines in the country. And our improv comedy troupe, Rathskellar (for those of you who never attended a performance) is the oldest, as well as one of the best improv comedy troupes in the country. Hey, does anyone else feel like I’m preaching to the wind? Oh well, you guys still feel that behind your back right?
And yet to mock Emory's whole unhumorous plight would seem too easy. Just kidding.
I think Emory could run a successful reality TV show called “Humor Factor.” We could round up a random group of students and place frighteningly funny jokes in Pandora’s Box and open it up in their faces and see who survives! Or would that be more appropriate for a “Survivor: Gilligan’s Island” reality show on campus? I’m not sure! Either way, I could imagine thousands of students in their dorm rooms curled up cringing at the creepiness of creativity. Maybe Emory could even pay for it to rain tears of laughter in our bubble outside during the weekly episodes a la The Truman Show. It would be hilariously dismal.
Emory, I won’t miss your naïvely conspicuous sense of self-awareness, your ridiculous reactions to “adversity,” or your elaborate farce of diversity. But most of all, I won’t miss your incapacity for humor. Because if there’s one thing I want to share with others, it’s laughter and light-heartedness.
So do I leave with a heavy heart or a hearty laugh? If I were wrung any wryer around the edges, I think I’d leave with a grimly humorous heart attack. But as it were, I leave with a healthy heart, a hearty laugh, and a heads up to those of you who feel similarly stifled by the uptight feeling on this campus: in the insanely censored words of Too , “Get in where you fit in.” Oops, heads down, you already lost.