Thanksgiving is a reminder of how unfunny I am. When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher gave our class a Thanksgiving writing assignment. Most students opted for some form of cliché sentiment, but one boy, Ryan, told the story of a packaged, headless turkey who made a daring escape from his owner’s oven. Everyone in the class thought it was hilarious. The turkey even performed a Richard Simmons exercise routine, clucking, “work those hips,” from somewhere inside his frozen, feathered flesh. Ryan enacted every move. Five minutes passed before our teacher regained control of the classroom.
I was jealous; as a shy seventh grader, I dreamed of my peers laughing at me in a good way, a way that differed from what I was used to. Even now, I can’t even recall my seventh grade English teacher’s name, but every Thanksgiving I remember the story of the reincarnated Richard Simmons’s great escape. The holiday is that one reminder that I never had—and at this point in life probably never will have—that sort of humorous savoir-faire. I’ve come to acknowledge that my sense of humor is ill-received. I’m more likely to get pity laughs from my bad jokes about vegetarians or writing than I am to get any genuine appreciation. My social interactions might eventually teach me the proper way to time a joke, but in the meantime, I’ll bitterly remember Richard Simmons, Thanksgiving, and seventh grade as an inseparable triune. But until I grow into my own humor, not even the discouragement of Ryan’s talking turkey could stop me from trying to tell jokes like, “What did one vegetarian spy say to another? We have to stop meeting like this,” or “A woman walks into a bookstore and asks, ‘Where are the self-help books?’ The sales clerk says, ‘If I told you, wouldn’t that ruin the point?’”
