Friday Funnies

The Friday Funnies have always amused us. I don’t mean the jokes (although they have made us laugh too), but the fact that the Friday Funnies are a fixture on our site about biblical womanhood.

We never expected to become a clearing-house for every cute kid story and clean youtube video, email forward and blonde joke. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we’re happy to do it, but it wasn’t part of the original girltalk master plan. Oh, wait, that’s right, there wasn’t a master plan. Nevermind.

Anyways, as I was saying, the Friday Funnies just kind of happened. We ran a contest for cute kids stories, but long after the contest was over, the funnies kept rolling in. And they’re still coming. For four years now, we’ve signed off every Friday with one of your jokes.

Well, recently I discovered why the Friday Funnies belong on a site devoted to biblical womanhood, and are, in fact, a strategic and vital part of our efforts to encourage women. (Generally, I recommend you figure out why you are doing something before you do it every week for four years; but in this case, it turned out we were on the right track all along.)

So today, instead of a Friday Funny, we want to share the profound purpose for the Friday Funnies. It comes from scholar and historian Paul Johnson, in his book, Creators:

"One of the most important [forms of creativity] is to make people laugh. We live in a vale of tears, which begins with the crying of a babe and does not become any less doleful as we age. Humor, which lifts our spirits for a spell, is one of the most valuable of human solaces, and the gift of inciting it rare and inestimable. Whoever makes a new joke, which circulates, translates, globalizes itself, and lives on through generations, perhaps millennia, is a creative genius, and a benefactor of humankind almost without compare."

To be fair, I’m not sure Dr. Johnson had bad women drivers or confusing grocery lists in mind when he wrote this, but he’s right about one thing: every Friday your funnies lift our spirits for a spell.

What’s more, as Dr. Johnson goes on to explain (and here’s the kicker!): “[W]omen, whose lives are harder, need jokes more than men and make them more often."

Our lives are harder (and pity the poor man who tries to tell us otherwise!), so we need jokes more than men and make them more often—every Friday, in fact.

Happy Friday, everyone,
Nicole
for Carolyn, Kristin, and Janelle