Chacos: I see deadpan people

The menu was highbrow for a midday potluck at work. The venue was not. I signed up to bring grass-fed beef burgers, someone else volunteered to bring locally-sourced lamb and venison, and others said they would make organic, fancy salads with ingredients you’d only find at a nearby farmers market. We felt compelled to share our culinary knowledge and techniques in case anyone dared to compare us to the spartan, sink-less, and dirty fluorescent breakroom where we often congregated during pauses from our workday. 

Within minutes, a coworker named Joe interrupted the flow of conversation to share what he planned to contribute to the group’s feast. In his signature swagger, he said, “I will bake some cookies and put them in a Costco tray. Just to keep them fresh and secure.” He went on to tell us that he will make a variety of moist and chewy cookies and display them snugly because he wanted to appear like a fancy baker, but I think he really wanted to use the word “snug” and “moist” in the same sentence. He carried on like that for a while eating up the long, awkward silence that followed him.

Joe’s pronouncement of store-bought, ultra-processed cookies resonated with me immediately because his entire set-up was dry, understated, and sincere. He further served it with subtlety and wit and didn’t look for a fan base that would lob meaningless accolades in his direction. His style is my favorite kind of humor. This unique, deadpan delivery is not for everyone, though. It’s often misunderstood or missed entirely because it requires one to pay acute attention to situational absurdities and then look beyond the literal meaning. The trick is to catch the irony between appearances and reality and hope to point it out before a more clever, quicker, and smarter individual takes in the scene first. It’s exhilarating, cutthroat, brutal, and fast. I was thrilled to have been in the right place at the right time to watch Joe’s exemplary use of wit and wisdom bloom in the wild.

His membership-only warehouse club cookies didn’t initially land well during the potluck planning phase. There were a few who didn’t see his joke at all. They may be reserved individuals too self-conscious to show their emotions outwardly, have a dysregulated nervous system, or struggle with any kind of humor in general. Then I heard through the grapevine that his comments came off as “sarcastic,” while others went further by calling it “dumb.” I thought Joe was being self-deprecating, creative, and honest in his observations, but some thought he sounded exclusive, and his comments served to make some feel smarter or better than others in the room. His dry humor and his ability to find the complex and incongruent narrative was obvious to me because as the potluck was becoming loftier and more ambitious with things like cold-pressed juices squeezed from the light of a full moon, the more absurd the juxtaposition. Some people just probably don’t like Joe for the cloak of indifference he effortlessly wears, but he nailed it in my opinion, and I credit him for giving me the opportunity to use the word “juxtaposition” seamlessly in an essay.

Laughter predates language, and it’s in our collective interest to find it anywhere we can, harness it, and hold onto it for dear life. My aggressive byproduct of unexpected laughter comes out as a loud snort, and I find that snorting helps me immediately release several of those feel-good chemicals. They work as my antidepressant, pain killer, and immunity booster all rolled into one fat hit. I don’t dwell on my embarrassing snorting for long because my body is rapidly going through physiological and psychological changes that help my brain and body respond more positively to the grind of work and routine, politics, family drama, and current events. I work hard avoiding my knee-jerk, overly-reactive emotions especially when strong feelings want to hijack my body’s emotional homeostasis. I’m always looking for a quick snort of laughter, especially the deadpan strain. 

Sometimes I sit alone laughing in bed or hiding in the bathroom watching reels of funny talking animal videos or rotate through compilations of the world’s best scare pranks. Other times, I want to surround myself with people that look for humor in unexpected places because they encourage me to see the world for its beauty more than for its flaws. I know laughing with others strengthens social bonds, reduces stress, corresponds with creativity, and dislodges blocked emotions stored in the body.

Occasionally, I’ll even snort midday at work when someone ceremoniously lays a 60-count tray of Costco cookies next to a vegan pesto pasta salad and ask in all sincerity if anyone would like the chocolate chip, white Macadamia nut, or oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. Nailed it again, Joe, and the venue was perfect, too.