Part of understanding jokes is the punch line

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May 3, 2010

Anonymous ---- The Randolph Guide Mon May 03, 2010, 01:15 PM EDT

Now I know why my mom doesn’t always laugh at my jokes – she doesn’t get the punch lines.

Don’t laugh. We’re all headed that way.

According to a Canadian study published by the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society in 2003, laughing is good for senior adults – the organization of which I’m a member in good standing.

The problem is, humor is good for us only if and when we understand what’s really funny.

“The good news is that aging does not affect emotional responses to humor – we’ll still enjoy a good laugh when we get the joke,” Prathiba Shammi, a psychologist for Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care, was quoted in an article by LiveScience.com.

“This preserved affective responsiveness is important because it is integral to social interaction and it has long been postulated that humor may enhance quality of life, assist in stress management and help us cope with the stresses of aging,” he added.

One of those stresses of aging is manifest when someone tells a story that leaves us wondering why everyone else is doubled over in laughter.

Maybe the problem is directly related to another sign of aging – distraction.

Karen Campbell, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Toronto, says that research shows that as a person ages, his or her ability to ignore distractions begins to deteriorate.

In other words, we seniors find it more difficult to disregard things like background noises or flashing billboards.

I, personally, find myself drawn to the crawl at the bottom of the screen during a news or sports program. Then I miss out entirely what’s being reported by anchors or announcers.

And that’s not funny.

There could be, however, some good with the bad. Campbell said we seniors may be able to “hyper-bind” the irrelevant information with the relevant.

I think what she’s saying is we can connect the stuff on the billboard to what we’re supposed to be paying attention to, thus helping our memory.

Now there’s a laugh. How can I connect what I was paying attention to – in this case the bottom-of-the-screen crawl – to what completely slipped by while I was reading the crawl?

OK, here’s the real kicker: as we age we need less sleep.

I could amend that thusly: we get by with less sleep.

A study of 110 healthy adults showed that those between 66 and 83 years of age slept about 20 minutes less than those between 40 and 55.

The middle-agers slept 23 minutes less than those 20 to 30.

The explanation by the researchers was that older adults need less sleep.

A corollary is that seniors have a harder time sleeping.

Well duh. Of course we can’t sleep as well.

For one thing, we’re still trying to figure out the punch line that zipped past us at the dinner table. “Artie chokes 2 for $1? I don’t get it.”

Then again, we may lying awake wondering what the deal was with the big smoky cloud over Iceland that we missed while reading that crawl about Sandra and Jesse.

By way of hyper-binding, I would surmise that Sandra found out about Jesse’s infidelities and torched his bachelor pad: thus the big cloud of smoke.

It’s just a joke, Mom.

Larry Penkava, who has written Now and Then since 1994, thinks there’s nothing funny about growing old.

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Part of understanding jokes is the punch line

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