If you don't laugh, it just seems mean

A couple of years back, I received a set of DVDs for the first season of "How I met your mother" for Christmas. It is a show I have often enjoyed when it is on the TV though I rarely go out of my way to find it.  One of the episodes caught my attention. In it Barney, the self declared "awesome" one of the group whose exploits are (in his own words) "legend... wait for it... dary", plays a prank on the main character, Ted. Towards the end of the episode, just before the pay off, Barney explains what he has done to the rest of the group, and is greeted with silence. He encourages them to laugh because "if you don't laugh it just seems mean". The lesson of course being that it is fine to be mean as long as it seems funny.

It was an episode that I was reluctant to watch a second time. The main reason is that I don't laugh, and it does seem mean. Or more precisely, it seems mean so I don't laugh. I find it difficult to laugh at some of the mean humor that people/TV shows/movies employ. One of the reasons is that it takes me back to
when I was trying to learn this weird thing called Australian Culture. You see Aussies like to rib each other. In some ways the more you like some one the more you give them a hard time, so to speak. It is like the unwritten rule in certain quarters that the more liked a person is, the more horrendous the rendition of "Happy Birthday" they receive on their birthday. Anyway, as a teenager I was trying to understand this concept as it played out in the wider culture (I later realised that my dad has always employed a mild version of this way of relating, I just did not recognize it as the same thing). I even tried my hand at it a few times.

Two events made me very careful about how I went about this.  The first was a time when I went a bit far. I had been exploring this Aussie form of relating, and getting more adventurous with it. This particular day I started in on one of my classmates, a close friend of a friend. I was getting some encouragement from the reactions of others, so continued to get more adventurous. This drew a greater reaction and so on. It seemed funny, so it was OK, wasn't it? I don't remember any of what I said that day, but I remember the feeling I had when my target let me know how much I had hurt him. More than that he waited until most people had gone before doing so- I believe in order not to humiliate me, even though I had done precisely that to him (there may have been some self preservation in there as well, but even if care for me played a minor part it still had an impact). The second event was being on the receiving end of a similar if less pointed barrage by some friends of mine. They couldn't see why I had chosen the course of action I had, and let me know at every opportunity. From their end it probably seemed funny to labour the point. From where I sat it felt mean.

So Barney, even if we laugh, it doesn't stop it being mean.