I Wanna Be Funny Again

There was a time when I made people laugh

I once spent an entire afternoon at work staging this shot with my friend Bobby because it was way more important for us to get it right than whatever it was we were doing for clients.

I want to preface this newsletter by saying that I doubt this post will be funny in any way. I cannot write about not being funny anymore with the added pressure of trying to convince you that I was funny once by slyly adding little jokes here and there. This is a dead serious post. This post is so self-important and literal minded, it probably works best as a Twitter thread circa 2017. This post has so little in the way of wit, it lists The Office as its main interest in its dating profile. You get the point.

Anyway, there was a time in my life when I was known for being funny and that time is long gone. I’m not quite sure when my sense of humor started to atrophy but I noticed I wasn’t as quick to spew pithy remarks sometime in 2021 and became fully aware that I was bringing out my same old hits sometime around 2023. The timestamps provide some obvious culprits. A pandemic that paused all the wonderful stage time I accrued throughout the year, where I put in all my creative effort to make audiences laugh. SEO-obsessed clients that have for sure phased me out for an AI bot, but not before turning me and my writing into a brainless machine, churning out turns-of-phases only a 4th grader in remedial reading could appreciate.

Do I want to blame the personal horrors? Not really. I’m a laugh-through-the tears kind of gal. I was cracking jokes a mile-a-minute while lying on a gurney in the scary ER, crying and praying I wouldn’t die, while also saying something along the lines of, “Could you tell my roommates to forward my mail here cause I’m moving in. Definitely bigger than my apartment and probably just as expensive,” to the nurses shooting me up with steroids. My routine was such a tight-five that the first thing the doctor told my mother in the ICU was, “She has a wondeful sense of humor.”

I can blame the financial horrors that forced me to tuck away almost every creative impulse I had in search of high-paying but soul-crushing content marketing gigs that left me babbling with the lexicon of a third-rate thought leader.

Do I want to blame the world horrors? Maybe, but not because the current state of affairs is meant to be met with the solemnity of bores. I’m from Latin America, dudes. If we had to stop artistry, including that of humor, because our country was going to shit, we would have simply stopped functioning the day La Niña, La Pinta and La Santa María loomed over the horizon. But I do think extremely online people felt pressured to interpret everything in the most literal, consequential way, and then do a close reading to see if it applied to them or some demographic they had decided to save that day, and then respond with a screed as to why you were right (but in a way that missed the joke entirely) or why you were wrong (in a way that made you feel like a shit human). At some point, you learn to shut up. Because it’s not fun anymore.

For a while, after diagnosing this loss, I tried not to make a big deal out of it. I figured once things stabilized, it would come back. It made guest appearances, usually when chatting with people, especially friends. My IG stories, where my Id lives, continues to be a hit. At least, I think. Please keep sending me your laughing emoji reactions, it’s giving me life. And hope.

My humor’s absence is more noticeable, though, in the same way that a sad clown sticks out at the circus. A few days ago, I was texting back-and-forth with a person I used to date and he kept gifting me great one-liners—a rare treat in the world of heterosexual dating, for sure. I couldn’t help thinking, bitterly, “But I’m usually the funny one in this equation.” My mind simply could not reciprocate. I was the giggling girl on the other side, which made me feel deeply inadequate.

Notes is not a place for jokes and I abandoned Twitter before Musk finished his purchase, so eager was I to spite him. After a brief return to my live lit antics in August and September, I stopped performing. Maybe I should try to see if I can find spots here in Lima for that, though I worry. Adding to my general funny malaise is the fact that I now live in a Spanish-speaking country. If I have a dark sense of humor in English, it is absolutely stare-into-the-abyss-dry in Spanish. To the point where I think only my friends from high school and (sometimes) my family can detect it. Lima is still the kind of place where if I say something like “Abolish El Regatas”—El Regatas being the snooty private beach club I AM ACTUALLY A MEMBER OF BY THE WAY—, I have people clutching their alpaca scarves and asking, “Pero, ¿por quéeeeeeeee?” There’s a lot of unpacking we need to do before I can punch up, is my point.

I really don’t have any solutions for this. If you do, please share them with me. My current literary projects are deep reflections on nationhood, the status of women, and family trauma, and maybe I should take that as sign from the universe to stop holding my intellectual thoughts at arm’s length. Dare to be serious! At 42-years-old I should strive to be that literary writer I dreamed of once, have the courage to fail at being a Writer’s Writer. What do I do with the fact that I cannot help but find the ridiculousness in the tragic? That to simply face it with the earnestness it demands feels like capitulating to the universe’s cruelty? That I joke to survive and also fight back?

If I hadn’t been so invested in prestige as a young woman, I would have probably done the right thing which was to pursue stand-up. I would have failed at that too, but it would have been a more honest form of writing.

Ok, so what do I do? Read a bunch of funny shit? Take more humor workshops? Commit to writing one funny line a day? Take a stand up class in Spanish and see if I can get someone in Lima to laugh with me? Dear lord, get on TikTok?????

Please don’t make me take improv again.

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Homework

What is one thing you would like to be again? Journal about. Meditate on it. Find one small way you can incorporate it back into your life.

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State of My Wallet

November Invoiced: $6,987.78

November Received: $5,287.78

I would like to reiterate, once again, that the only reason I can live off this kind of money is because I do not live full-time in the United States anymore.

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Progress Report

I’m still submitting essays and poems to literary journals way above my pedigree. I finally got a rejection. It was so fast, the grad student intern must have HATED it. As it their right! But I don’t care because I love this essay so much, I’m convinced it’ll find its rightful home, eventually. I’m in talks with a couple of editors about potential projects, which is giving me some much needed peace of mind. It’s been a while since I finished up a year feeling financially or professionally stable. Is this what normal adults feel like? The inner calm is strange but welcome.

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