LITTLE THINGS

……….the little foxes that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.

People can tell who you are by what makes you laugh. It’s an easy enough statement. One we probably don’t pay much attention to. It was this statement Vincent had to repeat to me while we were walking home from church one Sunday afternoon. Vincent is a pleasant, chatty and older friend I made at church. We met when we both signed up to learn to play an instrument at church and our relationship has been progressive.

We were talking about an incident that happened in church – one of the deacons had come tumbling down when the chair he was sitting on had broken. I hadn’t seen the incident but I heard the commotion. It was this “commotion” Vincent was relating to me on my prompting. I remember clearly saying “I’m sure I would have laughed if I saw it. I’m sure it was funny”. That was when Vincent replied with the famous statement- people can tell who you are by what you laugh at. I immediately looked appropriately chastised, but I actually didn’t see the big deal it was. I mean, we’ve all pulled chairs from underneath our friends just before they sat to create fun. However, the whole journey back home the statement had been on the background of my thought.

Here I am 7years later, having had a lot of years to mull over it, and I know the statement holds so much weight than I had imagined that Sunday. Elisa(my friend) said she wouldn’t mind if i shared her story. It is a perfect depiction of this statement.

Elisa’s Jacob was a fine young man. We (the lot of her friends) all agreed he was a perfect gentleman. He pulled out chairs, offered to hold handbags, didn’t swear, dressed decently, didn’t hit her, hit on other ladies…..i mean very traditional. So imagine my shock when he laughed at a joke a young man from our class made at a socialization. It wasn’t that he was laughing at a joke, but that he was laughing at that particular joke – a dirty joke. It made me question so many things about him and I could see from the look Elisa had on her face she was thinking along the same lines I was.

See what I mean? You can’t claim decency and laugh at dirty jokes same way you can’t claim to be morally sound/ upright and watch or read pornographic materials. You could talk until your face turned blue, and it will still be next to impossible to convince me (and I’m quite sure a legion of other people). I wonder how you could claim sobriety whiles you always keep a company of drunkards. It just doesn’t tally. What you find funny tells to a large extent what you are made of. Find filthy stuff funny and I will suppose you are comfortable with filthy talk. And you know, filthy talk makes you comfortable with filthy actions; filthy actions with filthy habits…..

You probably might have wondered growing up, how people (grown up mostly) could think you were disrespectful when you were only laughing at your least favourite teacher or your mean aunt/uncle/grandma that fell down. Think on it. It says something, doesn’t it?

It says a lot about you, what you laugh at or about.