I am learning from my boys and other sources that I am not as funny as I think I am. I recall the day when a woman looked at me right in the eyes and said Rod Smith you are not funny.

Humor in print (and all other kinds for that matter) is not easy. I might think something is very funny but unless readers think it is funny it is a waste of words, if being funny is my goal. A well-seasoned columnist once told me, after one of my funniest columns about the Queen of England got me a lot of hate mail, that we are often funny but some readers are deadly serious.

I’ve learned:

• Good humor has no victims.
• Good humor can endear an audience to a speaker or a writer; tasteless humor can send an audience in the opposite direction.
• What is funny shifts and changes a lot with geography.
• Some things are never funny (promoting cruel stereotypes).
• The ability to really laugh and to really laugh at one’s own foibles is an indication of emotional and psychological health.
• Persistently putting yourself down, selling yourself short, using yourself as the butt of your own jokes is not only tiresome, it’s probably a suggestion that all is not well within.