Love In The Time Of Apps (6 page)

“Don’t you think I know about my condition? I have been seeing doctors and psychologists for a couple of years. The upshot is that I’ve been diagnosed as being “Hypo-Humoresque. My HQ, humor quotient, is zero.”

“Hypo what?”

“Hypo-Humoresque. It’s like extreme hypoglycemia except instead of having no sugar those afflicted have no sense of humor. Once the condition attaches itself to a person, he or she has no ability to recognize, understand or process humor in any form whatsoever. HH people or the Comedically Challenged, that’s what people who are Hypo-Humoresque are called, are never funny, never joke, and no longer understand humor in any form. They are incapable of making jokes. More importantly they don’t see humor in anything, jokes, movies or comedies. Telling a person who is HH a joke is like saying to a blind person, ‘Isn’t that sunset beautiful?’”

“That’s crazy.”

Her anger mounted and she raised her voice by several octaves. “If I said I had cancer or diabetes, you wouldn’t say it was crazy. This is some form of pathology. It’s anything but crazy. Believe me, I know. And I’ve taken all of tests.”

He was incredulous and mouthed, “Tests to see if you have a sense of humor?”

“Wait here.” Several moments later Sheila returned with a blue booklet that looked like the kind he used in college for final exams. Its cover said
HQ –Humor Quotient Test, Copyright Humor Testing Institute
. Goodwin, in disbelief, mouthed the words Humor Testing Institute as if it were a concept that couldn’t possibly exist. Below that was the word HQ and presumably Sheila’s score, in this case zero. As he perused the book, Goodwin saw, that it contained a number of humor testing sections including jokes, puns, quips, routines, punch lines and “for extra credit,” humorous limericks (“Finish this limerick, “There once was a Rabbi named Sydney, Who had a pain is his kidney. He said with a moan, If I could just pass this stone...”) There was also the odd
notation, “Knock Knock Jokes are tested separately.” He looked at one of the questions in the punch line-puns section:

“Four high ranking officials of the Vatican were exploring the Amazon Rain forest, when a tribe of cannibals captured them, stripped them naked, and threw them into a deep caldron. As the water began to simmer, one of the officials, in a desperate effort to save his life screamed, “In the name of God and Dr. Oz, don’t you know anything about cholesterol? We’re much too fatty.”

The Chief responded with a scoff, “No problem, we’re the Atkins tribe.”

Another Official screamed, “We’re WASPS!”

The Chief responded again, “No problem, we like our meat basted with alcohol.”

The third official screamed, “Wait. We’re not WASPS; we’re Jewish.”

The Chief responded again, “Shalom Lantzman!”

Finally, out of desperation the fourth official screamed, “We’re all perverts!”

The Chief runs up and pulls all of the men out of the cauldron. Happy and bewildered one of the officials asks, “Why did you spare us?”

At this point Sheila was asked to choose the right punch line.

The Chief replies:

(a) We forgot that it was Passover;

(b) Catholics always make us feel guilty when we eat them;

(c) When we cook, we never use ‘odd official’ (pronounced artificial) ingredients;

(d) None of the above. Write your own line.”

Sheila chose none of the above and wrote, “He realized that eating other human beings was immoral, unless your plane crashes in the snow covered Andes.”

Goodwin said immediately, “Its ‘c’ because of the joke equates perverts and “odd’ and the phonetic similarity, albeit by a slight stretch, of “odd/official” to artificial.” Though he was correct Sheila became annoyed and said rather testily, “I now know that’s the answer and
think it’s simply dumb.” Then, playing the sympathy card with her eyes tearing up, said, “Now you have a wife who can’t have children or a sense of humor.”

Her tone was flat. “In any event, the diagnosis is that I’m HH. My HQ is zero. There is no cure for HH. No one even knows what causes it, but I do not really care. I can live without a sense of humor. Having it doesn’t seem particularly important to me at this point.” Sheila never pursued a cure after that.

Over time, Goodwin’s penchant for humor and Sheila’s lack of it began to erode their relationship and their marriage began to deteriorate, the result of comedic incompatibility. To his continuing disappointment, all those jokes, wisecracks or even puns, which he conjured up spontaneously or created with great care, no longer impacted Sheila in the intended way. She treated his humorous efforts as pure statements of fact and would often respond to them with a curious look as if he were crazy. With a tone implying that Goodwin was loony, she would say, “I don’t understand.” If she did sense he was joking, Sheila would admonish sternly, “Philip, for the thousandth time, please do not joke. I mean, what part of that request don’t you understand?”

“It’s as if I have a damn gag order in my own house,” Goodwin once complained to one of his friends. Then, thinking about his use of “gag order,” followed up with “no pun intended.”

To underscore her antipathy for his humorous attempts, Sheila began to wear a little lapel pin which said “Thank You For Not Joking” and placed pillows artfully embroidered with the same request at discrete places in their house. At one point she put up signs around the house that said: “This is a no joking zone,” but he made her take them down after they had a furious fight. Sheila soon found HH support groups and began attending HH sessions where people sat in small groups and told of their HH related troubles but, of course, never joked. Whenever Sheila brought home a fellow HH person she befriended Goodwin found that person insufferably dull. When the group met at their house, he could sense that they viewed him as a pariah.

While Sheila said she actually didn’t care about being HH, deep down and hidden from all to see and what Goodwin didn’t know was that it was one of the biggest disappointments of her life. Sheila longed to have a sense of humor and, more than that, of being very funny. Her greatest wish, however, one born from a mix of anger, jealousy, and resentment, was to become substantially funnier than Goodwin and, in a public and humiliating way, show him up in the humor department. When her wish actually came true, it played out on national television to one of the widest audiences in television history.

Because Goodwin was entertaining and very glib, he often held court for friends where banter would be the sport of the moment. Though not intending to achieve it, over time he became the star of the twosome, the one sought out by their friends. Although Goodwin never encouraged favoritism, Sheila blamed him for the obvious disparity of their respective positions in the club. Her resentment, never overtly expressed, festered and erupted occasionally through what Goodwin perceived was an irrational outburst.

Over time, their comedic incompatibility acted as a wedge that not only pushed them further apart from each other, but also acted as a stimulus for mutual antagonism. Sheila would frequently be furious if Goodwin joked too much at the club or at a dinner party and Goodwin would be resentful of her objections. In his favor, Goodwin took special care to never tell jokes at Sheila’s expense and would take to task in a severe manner anyone who attempted to do so. While everyone at the club was aware of Sheila’s condition, they politely ignored it, just as they ignored a member’s alcoholism, bi-polar disorder, or indictment. In all other respects, Sheila was normal and sought out by her friends for advice and companionship.

The final blow for Sheila came on Goodwin’s birthday, the day after the PPR site was launched. She had expected and hoped for a rating equal to or above Goodwin’s rating. But when she looked, Sheila found that she was not included in Pragat’s rating system. In a panic, Sheila attempted to call the company. A recorded message stated that all “advisors” were busy, but if she would hold on someone would be with her in the near future. “In the meantime,” the electronic voice
suggested, “you may find answers to your questions in the frequently asked questions section of our site.”

After holding onto the receiver and having to endure periodic “all advisors are presently with customers, but your call is important to us, so please stay on the line,” she spoke to an advisor who claimed to be “John,” who she was certain was not a John, but a Patel and most likely located in Mumbai or New Delhi. John advised her that anyone who had a zero in any category, hers being humor, did not qualify for inclusion in Pragat’s survey. “This rule,” John said, “is immutable.” The rule was later changed so that Pragat could keep Goodwin in the Survey, since he was a big draw to the site, even though he ultimately had all zeros.

Sheila regarded her exclusion as a personal disaster. More than most, she fully understood the importance that the Pragat rating system would ultimately hold for society and was acutely aware of the social consequences of her exclusion. Men and women to whom she had always felt superior now possessed something she would never have, a PPR. An instant before the PPR survey went public these people had looked up to, admired and in a number of cases envied Sheila. Now, as if by some type of social fiat, she would be regarded by these people as inferior. For all intents and purposes, many of her peers would now view her as a nobody, a non-entity, the “Unrated of Grace Harbor.” While the term had not been coined yet, she would soon fall into a group called “No Lifes.”

Sheila was in tears. When Goodwin sought to comfort her just before leaving for his birthday luncheon and offered to forego his luncheon, she swiped away the sympathetic hand he had placed on her shoulder and said gruffly as if touched by a leper, “Don’t touch me!” Then, possibly to make Goodwin feel guilty and in tone underscoring that she didn’t really mean it, she said, “Have fun.”

“In many ways,” Maxine opined at the end of their first session, one populated by articulations of frustration on both sides, “you are similar. You come from similar middle class backgrounds, have solid middle class values, grew up in similar environments, and appear to have many similar interests and philosophies. You are both college
graduates, hold post-graduate degrees, (Goodwin’s from Harvard’s Business School; Sheila’s from the London School of Economics.) It’s the humorless condition of Sheila that I see as the central problem.”

“I know,” Goodwin said feeling a bit of vindication.

“No, no. That’s the wrong attitude. HH is not a bad thing. It’s simply an inherent part of Sheila’s persona. I could have just as easily said that it’s your highly developed sense of humor that’s the problem. Your pathology Philip, for lack of a better word, is that you are afflicted, again for lack of a better word, with a case of irrepressible humor.” He was about to quip, “I guess having a case of irrepressible humor, is no laughing matter,” when he fully understood what Maxine meant by the term irrepressible humor.

“The quandary you both face is that HH is incurable just as having a sense of humor is, in a manner of speaking, incurable. It’s essentially an element of your being. Unlike some of the couples I see, where one or both adjust by making changes, neither of you can change these aspects of your personality.”

“What is important here is that humor is vital to any relationship. It’s essential to coping with life. It helps smooth some of a couple’s rough patches and, let’s face it, considering the spate of all of the bad news, it’s almost critical for survival. That you don’t have a sense of humor, Sheila, makes life very hard for you.” She shook her head in agreement and wiped away a slight rivulet of tears.

“And Philip, the fact that you are virtually prohibited from spontaneously joking or laughing in the presence of Sheila, has to be incredibly frustrating, perhaps impossible.” Goodwin shook his head in agreement. “But if you are both willing to try I’d be happy to help. While conventional counseling involves working with you as a couple, in your situation I think it best that we go one on one at this point.”

Despite his anger, when Goodwin recalled Maxine’s exact words, “one on one” he began to laugh in a bitter way. He muttered to himself, “One on one. I guess I should have realized that Maxine intended the term “one on one” to relate to his physical relationship with Sheila.” Nor was Goodwin suspicious when Maxine said to him, “I’m making
great progress on Sheila.” “On” was not interpreted in the sense of juxtaposed bodies.

Relating the story later to friends, Goodwin observed, “Dumb fool that I am, no red flags were raised for me when Sheila returned from one of her one on one sessions and said that Maxine recommended that she take a ‘sexual furlough’ from me. This struck me as ironic since she had been sexually AWOL for quite some time. Not surprisingly, our relationship, rather than improve, deteriorated, though Sheila did not seem to mind.”

Two weeks after Sheila’s departure, as Goodwin was walking to his office and for no particular reason, he stopped, and without really thinking about it, pressed the speed dial on his cell phone to get Sheila.

She picked up on the first ring, “This is Sheila.”

He didn’t announce himself. Rather, he said, “You know Sheila, I have lots to say to you, but for now, I have one question. Sydney Maxine, why of all people, him? I’m smarter, richer, taller, more athletic, more popular, and better looking. So what’s the attraction? For Christ’s sake! I’m a God damn 28.”

Her answer made absolute sense. She said, “He has no sense of humor, Philip. He’s HH just like me.”

At that moment Goodwin realized that as hard as it was for him to live with her, it was equally as hard for her to live with him. All of his rage dissipated at that point. He felt a large sense of guilt for his email message to Sheila and if he could have taken it back he would have. So, he attempted to do the next best thing and apologize on the phone for his insane email, but Sheila had already hung up.

Part Two

Love In The Time Of Apps

The Best Revenge

T
he anger, shock, and stress arising from Sheila’s departure earlier in the day had exhausted him. By day’s end, Goodwin longed for sleep, but none was forthcoming. The usual tricks used to coax himself to sleep, drinking warm milk or watching a really dull television program, failed. Goodwin even attempted to count sheep, but became agitated when the sheep he envisioned all seemed to be wearing little Manolo Blahnik shoes. The answer to his temporary insomnia, he realized, would be via the ingestion of copious amounts of scotch and Ambien. The potent mix had the desired effect and he dropped off immediately. His last words before crossing the border from consciousness to the land of Nod were a pouty/whiney/slurred, “stupid girlie man.”