The Rise and Fall of the Hormonal Comic

PMS.

Thanks for reading this far. You're quite brave you know, to muster on past such a terrifying apparition. Fearless, or you're acronym-challenged....or maybe just bored. Regardless, as a reward, I'll share a secret with you, but don't tell anyone. Just the people you know. Ok, maybe a few others too. To be honest, I don't care who you tell. It's not like I'm paid really well for this anyway. But I digest.

There are times when I'm funny. Incredibly, get yer diaper on, cork your bladder, blow it out your nose funny. Other times, not so much. Why?

Having less to do than even you, and having a government grant burning a global-warming hole in my pocket, I decided to investigate my own personal science of comedy. I put my humor, highs and lows, on a chart. Using only the finest equipment, namely Dave Barry's weblog, I implemented a 'snork' tracking device and extrapolated my results onto the following Gannt trending mahoozit.

WARNING- the following is quite graphic:

Impressive, yes, yet painfully sparse. While the colors invite one to compare me to Wyeth and O'Keefe, the obtuse angles offer paeans to Cubism. But I divest.
What factors were at work here? Did situation, attitude, stress, hunger, nearness to stupidity, necessitate a gear shift in fun?
I tracked it all, at least for a few minutes. Then I got tired and got a snack.

Eventually I crunched my hard data through a wood chipper and fed the results into a wetvac. It hurt like the dickens, but someone had to do it.

This next step was quite dangerous, so do NOT try this at home - you will frighten your neighbors and upset the cat:

Still not conclusive, but at least I was learning to draw curves. And I got to talk about astral planes and moons being in Uranus. All good. Unless of course you have Venus envy.

Here's the raw 'snork' data, tracking how many laughs I got on a daily basis:

Hilarious, no? I couldn't stop laughing after that one. This data was then ratioed against the time spent per diem on Mr. Barry's webblog:

While that may not make sense to some of you, face it - many things don't make sense, but this has graphs so it must be true. Besides, when was the last time you got to say 'ratioed' and 'per diem' in the same sentence and make it funny? I didn't think so. Plus the urology angle is both concise and obtuse. Snorkal rapture - our cup overfloweth.

As you can see, it's obvious, really, it all becomes vaguely clear - together, the full moon and I harvest a monthly bumper crop of jokes. Spikes of estrogen match peaks on the snorkometer index. Dang, I'm funny when I'm hormonal.
I'm sure some soulful writer will try to juxtapose the pain of PMS with the joy of humor. After I make him laugh, I will slug him.

A bonus discovery - on the rare occasion of a blue moon, my humor becomes, well... blue, stupid. Shocking, perhaps, but if you didn't see that coming, face it - you're stupid. Don't argue with me or I'll cry.

I've mentioned this phenomenon to several friends of mine, and not a single one of them refutes my case. Most of them just leave rather quickly, but hey- no disagreements, just panic, fear, and flight. Which is fine with me. After all, if I want company, I have the moon, my graphs and my chocolate.