Joe Born

an articulate argument against “giving a man a fish” instead of a fishing pole. http://t.co/D4YBi0V #Kindle

“Joe, we visited the doctor today, and I have some bad news.” my dad said “The doctor said I could well live another five years.” then he shouted to my mom across the house “Lucille, Joe turned white as a ghost at that grim news.”

Another time my dad and I sat at the kitchen table, and I listened to him go on about pharmaceutical industry and Medicare D prescription coverage. “Now with this medicine, I buy two months at a time, and I get a third month free!” I interrupted “Now Dad, I hope that if you ever feel that you may not make it three months, I hope you’ll have the consideration to not go so long on pills, we can’t exactly resell them as you know.” He laughed, marching excitedly out of the room and shouting to my mom “Lucille, you need to hear the instructions your son is giving me!”

As inappropriate or even offensive as these exchanges may seem to some outsiders, they are not the product of thoughtlessness or a lack of consideration. In fact, it would probably surprise outsiders to learn just how important humor is to us. It is because of this importance that we persist, and fumble with jokes that often miss the mark, sometimes offend and regularly elicit eye rolling. Humor is one of the most treasured gifts my father handed down.

I’m continually surprised to learn how serious, thoughtful, dedicated and disciplined the good comedians are. It really piqued my curiosity to understand what is so important about humor that drives them (and my family) to persist.

Perhaps there are nearly as many ways to use humor as other forms of language. It can certainly be used to hurt, insult or degrade, but less is thought about the positive ways it is used. I came up with a couple reasons it’s so important to our family.

Humor Increases the Bandwidth of Communication

Think cursorily about how to measure the throughput or bandwidth of human communication and you’d probably think of a measure like words per minute or the like. But as anyone knows who’s witnessed a dysfunctional relationship, there are often a large amount of words exchanged, often at high volumes and rapid paces. These words are comprehended, but not absorbed or accepted.

In fact, bandwidth can really be better measured by the effort associated with communication. When words carry the baggage of insult, embarrassment, awkwardness, they get rejected, or sometimes just never uttered at all. Sometimes this is because the concepts are inherently difficult to absorb, but sometimes they are very pleasant, but just out of the ordinary and just awkward to convey. Sometimes they are surprising or hard to believe. In any case, when words get weighed down, the throughput throttles and talking becomes argument, where there’s noise but very little actual communication. Eventually the effort for every bit of communication grows so high, communication shuts down altogether.

Take my dad’s five year joke as an example. Under the surface of this seemingly crude joke is a very serious and important message. “I am comfortable with my mortality, and I want you to be too.” Yet, deliver that message directly and it’s not only fairly unconvincing, but relatively awkward as well. Had he delivered the message directly, I would have been obliged to acknowledge it with “yes, I know.” even though it wouldn’t have been terribly sincere, and the whole exchange would have been unpleasant and tiring. Instead, what he delivered was terribly convincing and my acknowledgement in laughter was automatic and inherently honest. With humor, he didn’t tell me he was at peace, he demonstrated it. In the span of a few effortless seconds, he conveyed it, I acknowledged, and he passed along the whole exchange to my mom.

Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, most of the jokes miss the mark or fall dead, but it doesn’t take a 100% hit rate to get the point across.

We are a family that says “I love you” and “I’m proud of you” a lot, but the truth is, the bulk of our most meaningful and intimate communication isn’t done so directly, its done through stories and jokes because that’s where the real throughput is. An extemporaneous joke or story can often convey what a long essay would struggle to do.

Humor as Celebration

Like many families, we come together for cookouts, birthday parties and holidays. We blow out candles and open gifts and share dinners. But the moments we really celebrate the bonds that join us are the moments we joke.

“We’ll move our families into a single room shanty before Dad is denied a single pill he needs” my sister muttered after hearing one of our exchanges. Indeed we all believe this is true, and it is a source of great pride. Yet there is no party to celebrate this. Instead, we celebrate it with humor. Our jokes dance over the subjects that should bring great discomfort but where none is found. We set our priorities and have dedicated ourselves to those sacrifices long ago, and now we can celebrate what we have built.

I believe in humor, I believe in its power to convey important and difficult information and sentiments and, as a result, you’ll find me struggling and fumbling for the rest of my life. Like my dad, I’ll endure rolled eyes, blank looks and the occasional offense because every now and again, I will get the magic recognition that something really important has been communicated, and I’ve told a loved one something that I just could not say any other way.

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RT @dnaltews: @JoeBorn enjoyed your piece on Android. It blows my mind what people are doing with our platform. Nook was a total surpr …

Grand time at hacker dojo in mountainview barinstorming, ~9 weeks to CES, time to push!

This is a speech I gave in 2004 at a fundraiser for Half the Sky, an organization helping orphans throughout China:
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I got involved with China’s orphans because I had heard the stories.  I had heard the horror stories that rivaled any of those coming out of Hollywood.  I heard the stories of whole villages of parents practically being wiped out by aids from the tainted equipment used to extract plasma from the peasant farmers desperate to augment their meager incomes with such plasma donations.  I had heard about the orphan children ostracized by the other children, and the stories of orphans who had previously been top students in their counties, now out of school unable to pay the $100/year needed for school supplies.  I’d heard of orphanages with scores of children tied to chairs all day owing to the poverty and desperation of their caregivers unable to care for so many children when mobile, and I wondered when the Hollywood sized heroes would arrive to meet these horrors.

On one trip to China, I set out to meet some of these children, and I found many surprises on my journey.  The first surprise was a knock at my hotel door a day before I left for Henan.  It was the travel agent who sold me the train ticket.  I was surprised to have them delivered as I understood I was to pick them up across town at the train station before leaving.  Yes, the agent told me, but he wouldn’t be there, and he wanted to meet me and shake my hand, so he drove over to hand them to be personally.  As you can imagine, I began to wonder who he had me confused with, because I am not the kind of person people drive across town to meet.  I know who I am, and I am certainly no hero.  I sell electronics for a living, regularly wear shirts from Wal-Mart, couldn’t keep a marriage together and I consider it a good day when I’m wearing matching socks.  Yet the sentiment expressed by this fellow was echoed enough times that I started to begin to wonder what they were seeing that I wasn’t.

On this trip and other subsequent trips, I have met many orphans.  I have been swarmed by groups of toddlers so hungry for affection they crawl over looking for a few square inches of body just for a chance to snuggle with an adult.  I have met children so starved for love and support that a stranger traveling from America to see them is an inspiration and a highlight of their adolescence.  I haven’t seen anything on my trips that convinced me I was any different than I had set out, and I returned no closer to my image of a hero than I left, but I did realize that I, just by virtue of being a person with some love in my heart, have something to offer, something that these children need.

I understand that you, like me know who you are.  You are accountants or physicians, engineers or a stay at home parent.  You know your cubicle and the age of your car, and you are no doubt, just as I am, well acquainted with your shortcomings as a person.  We are all aware of the many things that these children have lost, the resources of a family, the love of parents, the security of a home.  However, until you meet these children, you may not realize the one gift they have that all too often we have lost.  They have perspective.  While our vision of ourselves is clouded by knowing our career success, our neighborhoods and our ability to get along with others at cocktail parties and PTA meetings, theirs is not.  They care about one thing about us, our capacity to give love, for that is the thing they most desperately need.  And when you have as desperate a need to be loved, to be cared about, as these children do, then the rest of a person’s attributes fade away into their rightful place of “unimportant.”  

Over and over you hear stories of the importance in an orphan’s life of knowing someone cared about them.  Failing a parent, a foster parent, failing that a sponsoring family from overseas, just someone that could deliver the message that their lives matter, that they are loved.  One of the most touching things I’ve seen from half the sky is the memory book they put together for each child, a scrap book filed with pictures and artifacts from their childhood.  It tells them that their life was important enough for someone else to document, and I can only imagine how much that must mean to them.

You came here tonight believing you knew who you were.  But my journey has given me an orphan’s gift of perspective, and I now see you in a different light.  I have come here tonight to deliver you their message.   

On the other side of the planet, there is, right now, a helpless child crying out in desperate need. 

Your cape and your phone booth are waiting.