The Funny Tomboy Next Door

It's true. Funny people are actually the saddest, most depressed, complex human beings on the planet but how do you deal with it? You have a laugh.

When I was a wee tomboy lassie, I was actually quite the dreamy only child, talking to imaginary friends, being lost in some artwork or with my head in a book, carried away by tales of fantastical creatures and lands. Being funny was the last thing on my mind.

Then I turned 9 and suddenly, my life did a 360 when I was prescribed my first set of coke glasses due to a bad case of myopia.

I found myself being called bad names, like blackie or brownie at school for being a pretty tanned Indian.

Growing up with funny female comics and characters from 'I Love Lucy', 'The Carol Burnett Show', Florence Johnston from 'The Jeffersons', 'The Golden Girls' and 'French and Saunders', I then discovered that being funny was a weapon I could wield to stave off my 'enemies'. Not only did it make me sound smart, cool and superior, strangely enough, it also made me feel bigger physically. Go figure, eh?

GROWING UP IN THE FUNNY CHILD ‘HOOD’…
It was the mid 80s and name calling was rife in the last years of primary (elementary) school for me. Never a day went by when I wasn't called something or the other and during those pre-Internet days, when one doesn't get to Google the best deregatory names on the planet, I realised I had to get creative with my retorts.

Luckily, for me, I discovered two things: that bullies are not very intelligent and two, I had a reasonable command of the English language for my age, so terms like 'nincompoop', 'pinhead', 'pox-lard-face', 'pig-dung' and 'demented fried cow' were very easy to come up with.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking; ‘Geez! That was really mean!’

Well, not really, especially if you're being bullied. In such cases, you just have to stand up and fight for yourself and come up with something that sounds even worse so you get to ‘win’ and let me tell you, even as a child, you get a real high from that kind of ego trip .

But that’s not all. You also had to deliver your killer punch lines with real emotional intensity and perfect timing. You also had to be a genius at concocting stuff that made you sound not only cool and smart but be able to intellectually confuse your ogre-brained enemies.

So for example, when in the bullying ring, you could technically knock your opponents out with something silly like 'You're so stupid, your brains would have to be observed in a petri dish under a microscope.' or confound them with 'You'd have difficulty finding your head on this planet if it wasn't attached to your bottom.'

But of course, in today’s Google-age where school-bullying has become more prevalent and violent, those kinds of naive semantics wouldn’t even cause a dent unless the school was having open mic night every Friday after class….

THE DEADBEAT TEENS

The teen years were tough on me physically as well. My sense of self-esteem about my looks were well into the negatives but I realised, like Barbra Streisand, I was quite the funny girl. People seemed to suddenly like me because I could make fun of myself and my coke glasses.

Most of my time was spent being a geek, always sitting at the back of the class with another motley crew of equally dramatic, funny and geeky mates.

We were all trying to play the class clown and I suppose that was our way of rebelling. However, at times, I think I tried to push the humour too far by playing incessant tricks on friends that I lost a couple of them; one of the prices one must pay to get a laugh.

These were the years when being funny just meant not being responsible for other people’s feelings. You just wanted to seek a cheap thrill for yourself.

THE ROARING 20s

My 20s were very volatile emotionally. I moved to the US for college and work. The pressure to look stunningly gorgeous at college and be ‘date-able’ was very great. With my newfound independence, I discarded the glasses and moved to contact lenses and suddenly I got caught up with another ego trip. The ‘ do I look attractive?’ one but deep, deep, deeeep down inside, funny ole coke glasses girl was still somewhere in there, singing loud and clear.

Depression, heartbreaks, stress from college and being financially challenged caused this tomboy to lose her funny from the age of 23 – 30. It seemed during those years, life was throwing all sorts of challenges my way and I totally forgot how awesome it was to laugh and have a go at oneself.

I went looking for my wit for years, but it was weird. It was as if the jokes had packed up and moved on to another city.

And if that wasn’t enough, I also had to contend with the fact that as the fairer sex, I wasn’t meant to be funny (boo!) and that if I was, I wasn’t attractive (boo again!) or fulfilling my role as a ‘real woman’.

It was as if there was this unspoken age-old pact amongst society that only men were allowed to be funny while women serve only to be future wives, giving birth in our Lady Gaga heels, to babies who hang off our nipples 24-7 until they are of school-going age. (O, my poor breasts are feeling painful already!)

Well, you can imagine how I felt. I definitely couldn’t stand such thinking. It was antiquated and certainly not how my parents brought me up. My family always encouraged me to be independent, to do my own thing and to think and be a useful human being. Never once did I feel like a ‘girly girl’ around them. However, the messages I was getting from the outside world was so different. It was limiting and created a lot of conflict within me because I wasn’t sure what the hell the ‘real woman’ looked or felt like. At all!

The need to be funny was beginning to return as my 20s went on. I was now looking for it to fill a huge void that had been created because of my emotional battle scars and inner conflicting views about the world.

Nothing happened until one night, when I must’ve been 27 or 28. I was at a friend’s party and after getting pretty inebriated (Ok, ok, pissed drunk), something just clicked and I got back into clown mode, sitting under the kitchen table, doing imitations of people I didn’t even know and acting like a MAJOR dork. It was pretty crazy stuff and I wasn’t even sure where this was coming from but screw it! It felt bloody brilliant!

In fact, if SNL was casting for new comics on their show that night, I might have gotten a crack at second-round auditions.

Was it embarassing? Yes.

Was I relieved? Yes.

Would I get invited to more parties? Probably not.

THE CALM, COLLECTED 30s

After riding the stormy seas of my 20s, my 30s was like being on a yacht sailing over calm waters. My confidence returned and the glasses slowly came back on. There was nothing to be embarrassed about, certainly not the geeky, funny side of me.

With the 30s, came a realisation that I could be funny but not in a hurtful way. This time, it was really about enjoying seeing people laugh and laughing WITH them, not AT them.

I accepted who I was and created my version of what it was being my own woman, without feeling the need to fall into society’s stereotypes and I began to make fun of myself. A lot.

Of course, it still is an ego trip sometimes (who said it wasn’t?) but when you start to see how much fun it is to just laugh till you tear or drop (whichever comes first), being the funny tomboy next door is really a great (and different) way to look at life.

So tomboy girls, get cracking! Your first bad joke is just around the corner. You just gotta grab it and let it come out.

PS: My therapist is going to love me for this! It looks like I’ll be up for another 4 sessions on the appointment card.