(The cover image is a throwback from 2013 when I took an improv class to hone my skills as a funny man.)

Around Christmas time five years ago, my co-workers and I decorated the cubicle of one of our co-workers in the office. With us being fairly new to the project and work being slow around the end of the year, we had time to spare to make sure my co-worker had one of the best decorated cubicles in the office. To make decorating the cubicles more fun, we told jokes amongst ourselves. I told them the joke, “Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7-8-9!” (you know…the number 7 “ate” the number 9…)

One of my co-workers called me a cornball for saying such a joke. Unsure on whether to take being called a cornball as an insult or compliment, I searched what the word “cornball” meant in Urban Dictionary. And what do you know! That joke was part of one of the definitions of “cornball”. Upon reading that definition, a part of me felt insulted. Little did I know that moment was a foreshadowing towards a life crisis I faced a few years later.

In a way, telling corny jokes was one way for me to seek external validation from others to assure myself that I am what I think I am. I had put in the extra effort in relationships over the years by going out of my way in reaching out with the hopes of having good relations, only to be left disappointed when much of that effort was not reciprocated. I had worked as a software engineer for almost five years, largely for the money without fully committing myself to the craft itself and wondered why I did not qualify for raises and did not get the jobs I desired as time went on.

When I hit one of my life’s lowest points being unemployed for quite some time about a year and a half ago, I fully realized that doing things for the sake of pleasing other people and making them happy over myself was unsustainable. How can I make others laugh when I am not even happy myself? How can I have awesome relationships when my efforts came from a place of scarcity, instead of a place of abundance? How can I even be fulfilled as a man when the career I largely identified myself with is not there at that point in my life?

Those were tough questions to answer as I needed to do some soul-searching to find my true “why”. The why that leads to joy, a state of being that produces sustainable happiness from within, not because of some external experience such as a “facebook like” that loses its luster with time.

I sat down one morning and wrote down a list of things I wanted in my life. What kind of work do I want to commit myself to for the next five to ten years? What kind of friends do I want to have from this point on? What kind of lady do I want to share my life with? Of course, she has to genuinely find my corny humor to be funny. When I listed those things I wanted and gave reasons why for those desires, I created a vision, a roadmap of sorts that will guide me to the life of my dreams. I read that vision at least once a day for a few months, and took small action steps each day that helped me slowly become the person I desired to be. The vision was revised every few weeks, as I used more confident language in my words to remind myself that “yes, I already am successful and yes, I already am funny” instead of forcing myself to believe that “I will try to be successful and I sometimes can be funny”.

About six months after creating and refining my vision, I started working as a software engineer for a healthcare company. With a healthy dose of commitment (pun intended) to the craft as a software engineer, injected with humor (another pun intended!) in our team working sessions, I re-discovered the joy of having fun in solving problems. I may not have fully resolved the issue I worked on that day, but I am confident that I will eventually figure it out. Knowing that I will handle things and achieving results in the process cultivated the joy that had largely eluded me for most of my life. Of course, it helps that the managers tell corny jokes, which turn our meetings into stand-up comedy sessions, giving me the license to pour gasoline on the already-flaming ball of corniness.

Here is a sample of corny jokes yours truly has told in the past year (see if you get the jokes):

 “So did you push the code to GitHub? Push it real good?”

“You merged the two code branches together? Did 2 Become 1?”

“We must give our code some TLC, because we don’t want no scrubs and bugs to creep.”

“I encountered a CORS-related issue, causing problems in accessing the webpage. I’m feeling breathless.”

“I resolved the card-body CSS styling issue for the popup. I fixed Cardi B’s appearance. I’m making money moves, and am drippin’ with finesse.”

“I couldn’t resolve the issue today. It’s gonna be another sad love song that’s breaking my heart this evening.”

“Time to run the program on the Tomcat server. Let me see if I can run it, run it!”

“This program performs like Usher. It likes to take it Nice and Slow.”

 “Click on the (window) panel to the left, to the left…”

“Who’s going to work on this task? Is it going to be you?” “It’s gonna be me!”

“We get along pretty well as a team. We are All for One. I swear. By the moon and the stars in the skies.”

“Ah, I made a mistake. Oops…I did it again!”

“I’m deleting this file. It’s going bye, bye, bye.”

“hmmm…” “hmmmBop!”

“I didn’t join the team challenge to lose weight, because I gained weight from building muscle. Somebody call a plumber, because these pipes are about to burst!”

“It’s the Year of the Pig. What do you call a Spanish pig? Pork-que!”

(Okay, the last two had no popular culture song references. It was funny to write it for the sake of writing it.)

By making corny jokes mostly tied to pop culture references, I remind people of a good memory. People will see me positively, as I brought a moment of laughter to their day.

More importantly, telling jokes is all about having fun. Whether the joke will be funny or not is besides the point. Funny and unfunny jokes have the same origin, which means there is no way to know if a joke is actually funny until it is told. In the process of telling corny jokes, I learned that it does not matter if a person likes me or not. What matters is whether I will like the person in that brief interaction. By having fun and coming from a state of abundance, I let go of a particular outcome and leave a good memory, knowing that what joke that just had to be said was said. We spend about one-third of our adult lives working. Why not make the hard work itself more worth the time spent by having fun?

I had experienced many failures and losses in my personal life, from a young teenager through adulthood. Humor is one way to cope with and to overcome that pain. With the help of humor, by reminding myself that suffering has its own seasons and does not last forever, I found nuggets of joy throughout my day that change my perspective to a more positive light. It’s one of my life’s hacks to turn a day full of chicken shit into chicken salad.

So yes, I will continue to be a cornball, telling jokes to make people laugh and to occasionally, troll them. It is here to stay.