Does my cat have a sense of humor?
So, I was talking to my cat today, and……
OK, let me start over. The cat was really talking to me.
I wouldn’t want to sully my reputation by letting anyone think I talk to animals. In any case, I have been trying to come up with an answer to a question I have, and the cat won’t give me a straight answer. So I want to see if anyone reading this can get me an answer to this conundrum.
Does my cat have a sense of humor?
So, here’s the thing. My cat goes on about her life doing a lot of the things I do every day. She eats. She sleeps. She uses the litter box. We both sit and stare at flat pieces of glass much of the day, although I read things on the Internet, while she prefers to watch the activity by the bird feeder on the Window net. However, I try not to project too much human social thought onto my cat. She is a cat, after all.
She does seem to be missing one of my human traits, though. I have not figured out whether she has a sense of humor. As a human, it would seem dreadful not to have a sense of humor. I wouldn’t even expect her to be amused by the same things as I am. She doesn’t like jokes. At least, she doesn’t like jokes told in people-talk language, probably because she knows very few words of people-talk language. This rules out anything that starts out with “A priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk walk into a bar” that doesn’t include a punchline that questions why three religious leaders would step into a drinking establishment anyway.
My cat does have fun. She can play with a fuzzy mouse toy for hours. She prefers the ring you pull off the plastic milk jug when you open it for the first time. But that is fun, not humorous.
She likes playing that game where she hides one sock of each color under the bed. I tend to think, though, that this is more of a coincidence than an actual sense of humor. I would think that, to be humorous, that she would have to understand the significance of only having one of each color of sock in the clean-laundry basket. So she doesn’t think of that as funny, she just sees that she is having more fun with cat toys.
So, do tell me, what would constitute my cat having a sense of humor? What, other than the fact that she gives me all of my ideas for this blog, and she just had me write a piece on a cats’ sense of humor?
July 24th, 2008 at 11:43 am
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