There are very few things in this world that remove me from myself and any concerns that I have. A select few bits of music - Steve Vai’s Lotus Feet and the instrumental break in a live version I have of Dream Theater’s To Live Forever are among those. Playing music with the Exhibit(s), most of the time (there are times that I am way too far gone, and the first set is spent bringing myself out of it and letting myself go to the groove).

My favorite, though, is laughter. Not in a movie or stand-up comedy sense, though those can be good. More interactive — I’m no comedian, but give me a good straight man and I can get some good riffs going. I’m like the ideal drummer — you’ll never hear me do a solo, but give me a good band and I can cut loose with a killer range.

There are certain people that I have an absolutely perfect chemistry with. Neely is one, and Wade is another. Email exchanges between myself and either of them are brilliant and should be published. Wade and I have very dry, cynical, and (to those who don’t know us) mean-spirited trade-offs; Neely and I tend to run a bit more intellectual with our exchanges - the award-winning (yes, I’m playing that one like a fucking golden trumpet) screenplay for Muckfuppet came almost directly from bits and pieces of email tossed back and forth between the two of us. I enjoy both equally.

My friends Kasey and Caroline are a lot of fun to email and IM as well — those exchanges tend to get downright silly. And those are great too. Comedy for me covers a vast spectrum — I like everything from the mean-spirited and angry stand-up of Bill Hicks to the pop culture references of Eddie Izzard and Family Guy to straight-up slapstick like Airplane. I like the intelligent and provocative comedy, I like offensive and lowbrow jokes, and everything in between.

Frankly, the most irritated I get in life is with people that want to silence certain kinds of humor because they’re offended. You know what? If it makes someone laugh, let it go. There’s not enough laughter in this world, and way too much of everything counter to it, so if it’s not to your tastes, just don’t listen, okay? Let me laugh at the Jesus jokes and the pedophile jokes and the gay and black and retarded and Polish jokes and the Muslim cartoons, and you can go elsewhere — how’s that sound?

Look, I get pissed off reading a lot of blogs — the ones that praise Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Roberson — so I know how you feel. Sure, I’d love to see them go away, because god knows that I don’t have the self-discipline to turn away and not read them, even knowing how angry I’m going to get if I read them. That’s the kind of person I am. And yet, somehow, I manage to resist the urge to leave mean comments, or boycott, or try to convince everyone that they are bad people for reading those blogs.

Guess that makes me a better person than you, right? Hey, I’ll take that story and run with it.

But this isn’t about us bickering, or us disagreeing. I’m even resisting the urge to post the most offensive jokes that I can think of (you know — the ones that end with “…and asks, ‘Can you put me up for the night?’” and “Getting the blood out of the clown suit”). Take a few minutes, and find something that makes you laugh — a Seinfeld rerun, maybe, or a Helen Keller joke, or maybe a Dave Barry column.

Okay, no one laughs at Dave Barry. Sorry.

Even better, do your best to make someone else laugh. Sure, laughing is a great feeling, but when you can find someone who with laugh with your humor — when you’re the person responsible for helping someone else move above and beyond their concerns, even if only for a second — then you’ve found one of your best purposes as a human being.

And I’m going to take a second to thank everyone that allows me to lose myself in laughter, without ever having to worry about crossing lines: Wade, more than anyone else, if only because he’s put up with my sense of humor for nearly a quarter-century. But no less so: Neely, Richard, Andrew, Kasey, Kevin, Garth, Bree, Jason, and Eric and Chance — if it wasn’t for you guys, throwing me easy softball straight lines and letting me laugh at whatever I think is funny without giving me grief about it, I truly would have given up hope.

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
- Thomas Szasz