to laugh or not to laugh?

Here’s an unmodified snippet of an interview I did with my daughters for another blog:

Me: Has being a stripper changed your attitude to sex?

Sarah: (thinking)

Jasmine: AHEM. WooOOOoooah. Ba-a-a-a-ah.

General snortage and mirth.

Me: Splirt*. What was that? Splirt*.

Jasmine: From a movie . . .

Me: Splirt*. Which one?

Jasmine: A sheep zombie movie. It’s called ‘Black Sheep’. Splirt*. It’s a New Zealand movie and the sheep turn into zombie sheep. And if you get bitten you start to turn into a sheep. Splirt*.

General snortage and mirth.

Me: And then do you go, ‘WooOOOoooah’?

Jasmine: No. Then you go, ‘Ba-a-a-a-ah’.

Everyone: ‘Ba-a-a-a-ah’. (But kind of random and unsynchronised.)

Jasmine: So you change ‘WooOOOoooah’ to ‘Ba-a-a-a-ah’.

Sarah: I don’t think so. (She’s still answering the QUESTION!)

Jasmine has her own particular brand of humour and this isn’t even a good example of how it works but I thought I’d put it in for your edification. Point is, in the comments to my last post A-mum described herself thus:

*hanging head in shame*

to which I wanted to reply, ‘YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED!’ a la Jasmine humour. Now we all know there is little or no risk of A-mum ever actually feeling any shame about anything, but I do feel a compulsion to explain first just in case. This might be a useful post for future linking purposes when I want to make rude comments to people and will thereby be able to blame Jasmine for the offence. Cool. I knew there was a good reason I had daughters.

Well it goes like this: When you are joking you might say, ‘You should be ashamed!’ when you really don’t think the person should be, and when you are not joking you might say, ‘You should be ashamed!’ when they have actually done something quite shameworthy. It’s important that the intonation be exactly the same in both examples. So Jasmine humour is quite an acquired taste because until you acquire it you really don’t know if she’s saying something offensive or funny.

Joshua totally gets Jasmine humour and has laughter as his default setting in all conversations with her. Joshua humour is almost the same, but that’s a story for another day. Me, I’m her mother and for many years I had No Idea. I would forever be saying, ‘Is that funny?’ Either that or continue with the conversation based on the information she had just given me until eventually she would stop me and say, ‘Mum. It was a Joke.’ These days I can usually get it by assessing whether she’s likely to mean what she just said and if not, laughing uproariously. Also snorting mirthfully and splirting. It actually is quite funny once you get the hang of it.

So, A-mum, you should be ashamed.

Get it?

* ‘Snort’ doesn’t quite cover it because this is supposed to represent that particular brand of laughter involving snot, spittle, tears and, if you haven’t been to the toilet recently, our old favourite little spirt of wee. A snort comes mainly out of the nose, but a splirt is a many-orificed thing.