Funny Mood?

An emotion is a chemical reaction that happens in the brain, if the emotion is sustained it turns into a feeling …sometimes the feelings turn into moods.  Occasionally a feeling can turn into four children but that is another blog post.

Moods can be charming and not so charming.  A good mood can pick up an entire group and everyone wants to be your friend.  A bad mood is like dog dirt on the bottom of your shoe…sometimes you don’t know it’s there till the end of the day when there is no one around to blame for the funk in the air.

Using our humour to alter mood is cost effective like staying single. Growing up my family laughed always, often and we were constantly cutting up one another. More than once I received a smack to the back of the head for "making" my brother and sister laugh at the dinner table. I had help occasionally from the mashed potato-pea mixture at the end of my fork; for the most part the funny came from mocking, acting out, word play and mime. I was pretty funny.

As we grew up so did our humour. Through our teens we ventured into practical jokes, fake fire drills, changing our names for the substitute teacher and rolled on the floor rehashing the prank phone calls we made earlier in the evening. "I'd like to speak to Buddy" ensuring the response "there's nobody here" was the height of our creativity. We were all funny.

Laughing with girlfriends always lifted moods. When did we forget how effective laughing is or did we just never connect the two, laughing and mood?

I took my first stand-up course in January 2000. I learned to put my angst into joke. Nothing is more empowering than telling an accountable joke. Owning the less charming events in my life has made me in some ways untouchable by my past, leaving me present, which is the only place I can eat ice-cream with chocolate sauce.

I will leave you with an example of Owning the less Charming Events.

I let a him stay at my house while I took my kids on vacation. I came back to a voice mail from a hooker, the message made it clear that he called her, she came over and... well I burned the sheets.

Set Up of the Joke: While I was in Disneyland

Punch Line: He was making my house his happiest place on earth.

I told that joke instead of the portraying myself as a victim of him and his antics. Of course I had all the experiences of betrayal, anger, etc but after the initial shock wore off the joke made it easier to talk to my girlfriends about. Yes I used this joke, and several other about that experience, in my routine for a number of years.

I'm hilarious just ask him.

~EvaPea