Sans Fig Leaf
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"...Or consequences"
26 July, 2007
It was my junior year in high school and I was working part-time as, essentially, a janitor at a county community center. I got along fairly well with most of the staff, volunteers, and the regulars. There was one staff member who seemed to dislike me from the start.
I don't know what it was about me that bothered her initially, but I remember well the moment when I realized that our working relationship would never be cordial. She and a couple of the regulars were talking and laughing one day. At what seemed an appropriate break in the conversation, I made some comment about her pulling everyone's legs.
She became extremely angry and chewed me up one side and down the other about how I didn't have the right to question her honesty. The tirade is seared into my memory mostly by the feeling of utter humiliation she managed to evoke.
I hadn't meant to imply dishonesty on anyone's part.
Yes, "Pulling someone's leg" means using exageration, embellishment, and sometimes complete fabrication for humorous effect. Obviously in a strict, technical sense exageration and embellishment both mean being less than completely factual. But that isn't always the same thing as dishonesty. It's about intent: if the primary purpose is to entertain, where the audience either knows in advance, or will learn before all is said and done, that you are simply spinning a tale, then you don't have fraudulent intent.
Not that I spent a lot of time thinking about it that way before saying it. There wasn't any planning. It was a casual conversation in which I became involved by chance. I used a phrase that had been used in many conversations to mean what I had meant. I had heard her use the phrase in that way. I had heard other people say virtually the same thing I had to her, without provoking the sort of reaction I got.
I realized, much later, that the difference wasn't simply that she didn't like me. She said it herself: I hadn't earned the right.
The other people who had said the same thing to her without provoking anger had known her longer than I had. She knew them well enough to know how they meant it. They had earned the right to a benefit of doubt, while I had not.
Which isn't to say that I was the only person at fault in the exchange. When a thirty-something staff member in any sort of workplace yells at and insults a teen-aged employee in front of customers the way she did, "unprofessional" doesn't begin to cover the situation. Regardless, one of the lessons I took away from the situation is that when you already suspect someone doesn't like you, attempts at humor are not likely to win them over.
Humor usually depends on a contradiction. It can be a juxtaposition of two incongruent ideas. Or it can be a ludicrous exaggeration of an otherwise ordinary situation. For any of those to work, the audience has to know the non-exaggerated ground rules. In other words, they have to know what to person making the joke thinks is ordinary, normal, or expected.
Communication is always context-dependent. The context isn't just where and when a particular comment or question comes up, but also who says it--which includes the relationship between the speaker and listener, with all the history and expectations that may go with that relationship.
Context also, unfortunately, can include lots of things one or more participants don't know about. Maybe I reminded her of someone else she had a bad relationship with. If so, everything I did and said was weighed down with the baggage of that previous relationship.
Or maybe I did something early on that provoked her negative reactions. She may have had perfectly legitimate reasons not to like me. Just because I don't remember doing anything to offend her or push her buttons doesn't mean it didn't happen. Just as she probably thought her reaction was to my faux pas was a reasonable reaction.
Our own perceptions of any situation are never more than half the truth. It's not very comforting to realize that we usually only suffer half the consequences when situations go badly, but it's worth remembering.
--Gertrude Stein
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