How's your sense of humor?

Mine is strange, or so I am told. Often. By many different people.

I don't laugh at slapstick comedy. Traditional jokes usually fall flat with me. What makes me laugh is the unexpected, the ironic, and the just plain bizarre. The weirder the ideas that are juxtaposed, the funnier it looks to me.

For example, last week my son had to have minor surgery. Before taking him back to the operating room, the anesthesiologist gave him a pretty solid dose of midazolam, which has very potent short-acting alcohol-like effects. Ten minutes after drinking the liquid, my two-year-old was plastered. He was giggling at the ceiling in the asthesiologist's arms because he couldn't hold his head up. To me, this was hilarious. A drunk toddler. You don't see that every day.

Now, mind you, I'm not amused when people are actually harmed. If my son had been drunk on actual alcohol, I would have been horrified and infuriated at whoever had given it to him. The pre-op cocktail incident was funny in part because it was prescribed for him.

Another phenomenon that amuses me is quotes that would sound wrong or bizarre out of context. When I was in college, I kept a piece of paper on the wall where I would write such quotes, and called it "the Random Quote Board." These were not quotes of the stupid things my friends and I would say when drunk. To qualify for the RQB, a quote had to make perfect sense in the context in which it was said, and essentially no other context.

Anywho, the big disadvantage of having a strange sense of humor is that it can be hard to find funny stuff when you want to. If I google "humor," most of what comes up is not funny to me. So, when I do find a website that tickles my funnybone, I make note of it. One of my favorite tricks for a quick laugh is to type something random in Altavista's babelfish website, translate it from English into Russian, from Russian to Japanese, from Japanese to French or Italian, and back into English. Usually what I get back is completely unrecognizable, and for some reason, this amuses the heck out of me. The more idiomatic or colloquial language I enter, the more distant the eventual translation is from the original.

Well, a couple of years ago, I discovered a site that collects examples of this phenomenon in real life: http://www.engrish.com Like any collection, some are funnier than others. But in general, the attempts of commercial enterprise to translate between radically different languages, and the resulting mistakes, can be outrageous. Even funnier is when people buy something that looks cool to them, totally ignorant of the effect, like the Japanese boy wearing a shirt that says "Warning: educated black woman."