Whitman: Why so serious?

Once every year, children stumble around neighborhoods, high on sugar, rushing door to door with sticky little buckets, whining the same clichéd phrase: “Trick or Treat.” What seems like an innocent choice, however, is really just a calculated demand for candy, not an oppertunity to have fun or enjoy a night of mischief. Unfortunately, this development often persists into adulthood, with humorless children maturing into boring adults, intent on reaping the sugary but unfulfilling rewards of life while bypassing some of the more risky situations that life has to offer. These are the people who sit stoically through Will Ferrell movies, who complain to the authorities when the music is played too loud, who view pranks as ghastly attacks on their physical well-being.

For those of you about to disgustedly put down this newspaper, I hope you realize that the last sentence was a little something called satire, aimed at those who can’t take a joke. These humorless individuals always confuse me; don’t they realize how pointless it is to feel affronted by harmless comedy? Life is short enough, and laughing is what helps us get through the tougher times.

Last week, for example, a friend of mine pranked me by sending a link showing a screaming, flashing ghoul. After the initial shock wore off, I laughed at how high I had jumped and even sent it to a few of my friends. The response was unanimous: Nobody thought it was funny. Instead of seeing it as a lighthearted joke, they responded with words unprintable in a newspaper, taking an overserious approach to nothing more than a joke. Sadly, we’ve been raised to take offense at material that forces us outside of our comfort zones and, if anything disturbs the perfect order of our world, we immediately remove it. Pulling harmless pranks has become the epitome of sin, and a little harmless fun is rejected, seen as loathsome and repulsive.