McKenna's Laughter Blog

In my last blog post for the semester, I wanted to address two of the common themes in humor regarding COVID-19: jokes about your kids and jokes about your significant who you're quarantining with. Although my mom doesn't have small children she has to entertain and homeschool while being stuck at home, she has been loving all of the memes and videos about moms who do (which she shows me throughout the day). Her favorite ones have been about "fire drills" where moms lock their kids out of their house and wonder how long they can pretend the drill is going on before they should let their kids back inside. I've seen criticism about humor along these lines because some people say it's not funny to talk about locking your kids out of your house or complaining about being stuck with them all day everyday. What I think? People need to laugh during this time otherwise we'd all go crazy, so why can't we all enjoy the jokes and know that's helping people g...

This semester I've learned a lot about laughing and humor. Here are the top 5 most relevant things I'd like to keep in my back pocket in case I need to use the knowledge again: 5. I should be really afraid of elevators. I'm not super claustrophobic, but from all the elevator pranks I watched, I'm going to be a little more weary of them from now on. 4. I would never, ever have wanted to live in Victorian England. Based on all of the videos we watched and the satirical elements of The Importance of Being Ernest , I've come to the conclusion I would not have survived living in Victorian England. The societal rules were (excuse my British) rubbish, and the things women did to be pretty literally sometimes killed them. Never will I ever look down upon women from Victorian England again, and I continue to thank my lucky stars I didn't have to live then. 3. Laughing was an evolutionary social skill. To be honest, I'm not sure I ever really thought about wh...

In filling out my survey for the Honors Laureate ceremony, I was asked to recount one of my fondest memories at TCU, and this lead me and my best friend, Olivia, down a spiral of fun memories we had together. For this post, I wanted to just put some of those in writing, because I'm becoming very sentimental about my looming graduation. Memory #1: Trying to learn the Fake ID line dance at 1:00 in the morning I was always an adamant Billy Bobs goer, but being from the Midwest means I didn't have previous knowledge of the common southern line dances. After my first few times Bobs experiences, I made it my mission to learn all of the ones they played every week, including the hardest one to Fake ID by Big & Rich. One Friday night, I recruited Olivia to try and learn it with me. We hooked up Olivia's computer to our sorority house's TV, and watched the tutorial video over and over and over again. We worked on it for about 2 hours before Olivia's roommate, Anna, ca...

Just recently I have rediscovered the joy of meditative adult coloring. I've had an adult coloring book since I needed to spend a Barnes and Noble gift card in high school, but I've used it very rarely. As we go further and further into quarantine, I've had to rediscover old hobbies and pastimes, so a few weekends ago I broke out the adult coloring book. It's a mandala coloring book (which is basically geometric shapes made into a circle that was invented in Hindu and Buddhist culture), and I'd have to say that it is as meditative as the front of the book says it will be. For each coloring page, I choose three colors and repeat the colors over and over again until I finish the page. The first one I did took me approximately 5 hours total, and I've done 4-5 since then. Being in quarantine, what's been hardest for me is having literally nothing else to think about besides COVID-19. It colors (pun intended) every one of my thoughts, since my entire life would ...

Although it's a little late, here are my reactions to the favorite cartoon character activity. My definite favorite part about the activity was getting to know everyone in class a little better. Having class via Zoom makes it a lot harder to form those friendships that being in physical class makes possible. I miss turning to the person next to me to say a funny remark or being able to look around the class and see the stickers on people's water bottles. This activity was a fun way to continue the relationships we'd started forming in the first few months of class even without being in SCHAR 2001 (which I think was our classroom). Someone's favorite cartoon character says a lot about a person, and it was really fun hearing what everyone's response was. How, you ask, does someone's favorite cartoon character say a lot about them? I'll use the example of myself. My favorite cartoon character is Cinderella because I don't watch many cartoons, but I love t...

I love reading. Always have and (hopefully) always will. It was always my primary form of entertainment, and this past week I've rediscovered just how much I love it. My boyfriend got me a Book of the Month subscription for my birthday in November, and when my April book came last weekend, called The Library of Legends by Janie Chang, I basically couldn't put it down. I read it as much as I could until I finished it on Thursday. While at my lake house this weekend (where my main activity is always reading on our super comfy couch), I started and almost finished another book - Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. These two books rekindled my love for reading (that I'd really lost only briefly since my March Book of the Month), and now I'm here to tell you why I think reading is SO MUCH better than watching movies. 1. Reading lasts WAY longer I get sad when a movie I love finishes just an hour or two after I've started watching it, but I can nurse a good book for a ...

While this spring semester hasn't turned out to be exactly what I thought, I do agree that laughter is the best medicine. I've been trying really hard to find humor in everyday, and here's my top 5 tips on finding humor amidst a world turned upside down. 5. Play pranks on your family. (Remember, though, that they're the only people you can talk to until at least April 30th, so plan accordingly) 4. Try and write your own stand-up routine. (I guarantee even if it's terrible, you'll laugh trying) 3. Look at your favorite comedic YouTuber or Tik Toker. 2. Zoom your friends for a happy hour or a game night. (I've heard Pictionary is a great Zoom game) 1. If worst comes to worst, just buy your favorite comedy movie on iTunes and you'll be able to watch it whenever and wherever you want. (My personal favorite is She's the Man) I know that some days, for me, it's hard to laugh, but it really does wonders to lift sad spirits. I hope everyone o...

While loosely following the rules of social distancing, my family has been spending every weekend in quarantine at our lake house with one or two other people we invite for a nice, wifi-free weekend away. Last weekend we invited by best friend Kyla and her mom to come for a rainy weekend of eating, drinking, and board games. My mom had just bought a new board game called "New Phone, Who Dis?"from the same creators as "What Do You Meme" if you've played that popular game. "New Phone, Who Dis?" follows the same rules as "Apples to Apples" (where a category card is played and everyone submits one of their cards as a response, and a judge picks the winner of the best response), except it's supposed to be like a texting conversation. The judge picks an "Inbox" card and each participant picks their best "Reply" card. To really set the stage for the game, each card is designed like an iMessage conversation on an iPhone, but t...

To preface this entire post, I'd like to say that I really don't watch movies. I'm very busy, and I find the idea of having to sit for 2-3 hours to a watch a movie that's probably not even that good a little daunting. I'm also an avid reader, so I'd much prefer to read in my free time than watch movies. In looking at internet lists of the top comedies, I just really haven't seen enough of them to pass judgement. That being said, here is my top comedies list: 1. She's the Man (also my favorite movie of all time) 2. Pitch Perfect (my second favorite movie of all time) 3. Napoleon Dynamite 4. 21 Jump Street 5. The Heat As far as the silent comedy compilations, they weren't my favorite, but I did find humor in them. As new age as it sounds, I strongly dislike watching both black and white AND silent films, so I could never watch an entire comedic film from the early 20th century. I will, however, list here my favorite scene from each of the actor ...

Here's a selfie (after 10 hours in the car )with my favorite author Toni Morrison.

My first uncontrollable laughter episode for the second half of the semester happened last night. I just got a new ear piercing, and ever since then, my boyfriend, Matt, and I have been arguing about the best way to pierce an ear at home. I say that it’s more common to use a sterilized needle and an apple, while he says it’s better to use a potato rather than apple. I honestly could not tell you how or why we came upon this subject yesterday night, but this time, instead of arguing for either a potato or an apple, we each came up with more and more ludicrous things one could use to pierce an ear besides a nail and either a potato or an apple. Below is a short list of some of the options we had (in order of ludocrity): A Samurai sword and a peach A rusty nail and a pineapple A chef’s knife and a grape A dull butter knife and an artichoke A twig and a carrot A sharpened fingernail and celery A cursed dagger and my ex’s still beating heart A cactus and my left hand (the cactus bei...

For this blog I’m going to reflect, for myself, on how my semester is going thus far. The semester started out pretty slow for me – I didn’t have much reading for the first few weeks, and even when the reading started, I didn’t have much else. It seemed like I was missing something because I was always ahead on work which never happens. Don’t get me wrong, I always do my homework, but it’s almost never done earlier than the night before. This first month of bliss was great and I felt on top of the world (not to be dramatic about it or anything)! Fast forward to when the papers and tests started coming – it really wasn’t that bad either. This semester I switched around what normally is my schedule (i.e. class in the morning and work in the afternoon to work in the morning and class in the afternoon), and it seemed to be working better. I’m most productive in the morning, so I did all my homework at work usually 1-2 days in advance. Usually by the time I get to class I’m pretty tired and...

I would like to take this post to give a shoutout to moms. Moms are great. They are all different, but they are the kind of people that give me hope in humanity. They have an extremely high capacity for empathy, and I am more grateful for that everyday. I have many interactions with moms (most notably my mom and my friends’ moms), and I had a great one this past weekend. Last Friday I drove down to San Antonio to attend the finals of the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo with my best friend from England, Chennya, and her boyfriend, Jarrod (both of whom I work with at summer camp). We three stayed with Jarrod’s mom who lives outside of San Antonio in a little southern town called Gonzalez. It was the most stereotypical small southern town I’ve ever spent a chunk of time in, and Jarrod’s mom Paige made my stay significantly better. Since Chennya and Jarrod are both good friends of mine, I am often their third wheel as I was this weekend, and Paige made this weekend’s third wheeling so muc...

I wouldn’t consider myself a YouTuber and I don’t often go on YouTube, but yesterday I was curled up in my bed for my sick day and fell into the trap. I started on Twitter, but decided to reminisce upon the wonderful days of Vine (pre-Tik Tok). There are many Vine compilations on YouTube, and yesterday I picked the one entitled “Vines That Keep Me From Ending It All.” Yes, the title is a little sinister, but it’s a great video. While I was watching this 14-minute video, there were more than a few times I broke out into uncontrollable laughter. What makes this laughter session different from others, specifically, is that I was alone in my room. I didn’t have anyone to laugh with or at, but I was still literally LOLing. For the rest of this post I’m going to describe a few of my favorite Vines from the video and try to understand why I laugh so hard at them. My all time favorite Vine is a guy driving a car who passes a “Road Work Ahead” sign and says “Road Work Ahead? Uh, yeah I sure ho...

"It cannot be denied that in the long run laughter and reason and nature have mastered every single one of these great teachers of an aim. In the end, the brief tragedy always turned back into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter,’ to use Aeschylus’ expression, must finally crash over even the greatest of these tragedians. But despite all this corrective laughing, human nature has nevertheless been changed, on the whole, by this constant reappearance of these teachers of aim of existence... The most careful friend of humanity will add, ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom, but also the tragic with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of preserving the species!’" Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science.” Existentialism: Basic Writings, edited by Charles B. Guignon and Derk Pereboom, Second ed., Hackett, 2001, pp. 131.  This quote is a small part of the longer work by Friedrich Nietzsche entitled The Gay Science ...

One of my favorite pastimes is making fun of my boyfriend, my friends’ boyfriends, or really any of the male species for their shared, weird habits. Men think that women are hard to understand, but I think that we have logic behind our weird habits at the very least. Men on the other hand? Most of the time they can’t even justify their actions because they know they’re ludicrous, and a prime example of this left my friend Rachel and I in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I’m going to recount to you this story that I have entitled Laundry Laughter. About a week ago I was FaceTiming my boyfriend Matt who was on his 16th full day of having mono when he told me he had a confession for me. Instantly my mind went to all the terrible things he might be confessing like wanting to break up with me, but what he confessed was even better. He said, “McKenna, I’m not going to lie to you - I’ve been wearing dirty underwear for over a week now, because I don’t want to get out of bed long enough to do...

I’m only taking four classes this semester, and for my first journal entry I wanted to highlight my favorite one so far which is titled Literature of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Minority Literatures. In this class we’re focusing on a select few minority populations within the very vague Arab World region of the Middle East and North Africa, generally characterized as countries that have Arabic as one of their official, primary languages. Coming into this class, I knew pretty much nothing about the Arab World, so I learn so much every single class. So far, I’ve learned about the incredibly arbitrary splitting up of the Arab states after both World War I and World War II. I’ve learned how colonial powers treated the people in their Arab World colonies as second class citizens needing to be Christianized and civilized. I’ve learned that even within Arab controlled, independent countries in the MENA region, minorities are treated as second-class citizens and often have the...