Born Standing Up

I had the most delightful trip to the library today to pick up books on CD for my upcoming seminary scouting trip (yessss! I'm so excited!). I left behind a bunch that looked good, so I may start listening to them in daily life in the car if I can somehow square it with my unnatural love of NPR. I'm really excited to listen to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a selection of Christmas items from the Reduced Shakespeare Company, a couple of mysteries to keep it exciting, and one or two more.

I was so happy to have them that I popped one in right on the way home from the libes: Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's memoir. I'm on disc two now, which means it/I/we got over the hurdle of the all-important first disc switch. Martin is a pretty good and sometimes great writer on the sentence level, such that I may one day want to read it and copy down a phrase or two. I like the book so far for many reasons, partly because I've always been interested in humor as something to study. It seems so spontaneous, so undefinable, but I've heard many people say it's a science to be learned and practiced. Martin talks about falling asleep listening to records of comedians, playing them over and over to listen for their timing, vocal nuances, everything. He learned the banjo the same way, even slowing down the records to hear each note.

The idea of humor-as-science fascinates me because it's sort of heartening that something so seemingly effortless can be mastered with practice and time. When we see people who are great at something, there's no reason to be jealous in most cases because they probably spent their whole life perfecting it, to the exclusion of certain other joys. We're not all that different from each other. No one was born standing up, funny or otherwise. Yes, we have inclinations and talents, but those are nothing without effort. You might see someone's ability and wish it were yours, but just think--to be that good of a (musician, artist, mathematician, fill-in-the-blank), you would have had to sacrifice a lot of what you've done instead and, consequently, who you are now. You'd be a great fill-in-the-blank, sure, but there's no telling who you'd be as a result.

Let's all be thankful for who we are, what we're good at, what we're terrible at, and all the wonders of the world around us.