The next thing I noticed was that I was the butt of half of my jokes. I’d keep thinking of zingers which made me out to be a loser, a moron, a scrub in some way. Sometimes, I could re-work the joke to not insult myself. Often I couldn’t. Self-mockery served as a crutch for me.
Well-meaning note to people who do this a lot: what you think of as a ‘zinger’ is frequently not very funny and is just a self-insult. This post calls them a “crutch”, but crutches trade off atrophy in your legs for letting you move around. For many people self-deprecating humor is more like digging a hole and lying in it: your normal humor atrophies and you’re not funny while you’re using these.
Props to OP for getting off this thin humor and onto the good stuff :)
Well-meaning note to people who do this a lot: what you think of as a ‘zinger’ is frequently not very funny and is just a self-insult. This post calls them a “crutch”, but crutches trade off atrophy in your legs for letting you move around. For many people self-deprecating humor is more like digging a hole and lying in it: your normal humor atrophies and you’re not funny while you’re using these.
Props to OP for getting off this thin humor and onto the good stuff :)