Whether it's an innate ability or an acquired way of regarding the world around us, being labeled as funny can only be accepted as a compliment.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you can be funny, it means you're intelligent. Your brain is working fast.
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
That word 'funny' always makes me feel uncomfortable. Because if I were trying to be funny, I would be something like Bill Wegman - he really tries to be funny. I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter, and I'm sort of reporting.
I realised that if you get yourself labeled as the funny one, people don't look any further. I've used that as I've got older. It's controlling: I decide what part of my personality you're seeing. I don't want you to look at me, I really don't. I don't want you to comment on my clothes, my hair or the way I look.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.
Your funny gets developed pretty early on. Comedy requires that you understand as much as possible about the viewpoints of all people and everything that's going on around you. It genuinely requires a true point of view, a real sense of your own view of things in the world.
It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.
We have a curious relationship with 'funny' in the U.K. We love to laugh, but we also think that making people laugh is just a little bit second-tier, especially in a literary context.
I actually think of being funny as an odd turn of mind, like a mild disability, some weird way of looking at the world that you can't get rid of.