Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod. Have we talked about this before? I wrote about it before, a long time ago. Following and escalating a silly concept is my favorite humor. (Maybe my only humor? Slapstick breaks my heart and puns come from Satan. I must like other types of humor, but I'm not thinking of them.) Chris and Anand and my sister are so good at it. My lifting group is good at it. Yesterday we started cheering for the baby warm-up lifts like they were the most serious intense attempts ever. That was very funny, um, at the time amongst the few of us.
I understood it better when I learned about the improv concepts of offer and acceptance. The imaginary what-if is an offer that the person is holding out to you. She's trying to give you this present, of an idea and a chance to play. I don't actually like when it goes unremarked, because then the person I'm talking to just turned down the offer. In improv they call it denial or blocking. I call people who do that "fun-sucks". They suck the fun out of the air, act like dampeners on the whole room1. So, no. I don't really click with them.
I've never thought about whether I like to talk about the real or the imaginary. I should watch for that. Mostly I like to assert the imaginary as real and then wait for it to come true. When you move here, we will grill veggies on the porch all summer long.
1I noticed that very strongly in two women who were both extremely beautiful, petite, American-born but strongly ethnic looking. My tentative hypothesis is that they are both so beautiful that they have never had to do anything in conversation. So far I'm not sure of this theory, but Three Makes a Rule, you know. One more boring-as-fuck, extremely beautiful little Asian-Am woman and I will know for sure. (This is not to say that all Asian-Am women are boring as fuck. I know some super funny and wicked Asian-Am women, little, beautiful and otherwise. Just that the two women in whom I most noticed that deadening quality were similar to each other in that way. (Very different Asian nationalities.))