I have been blessed with a lighting-fast wit. I can come up with a sarcastic, topical, understated comment in less than a heartbeat. It comes out so quickly that it takes a few seconds for it to really sink in like a fart. You hear the fart before you smell what it means.

My humor is like a fart? That’s seriously the best analogy I can come up with? Let’s try that again. My humor is like a ninja: You are dead before you know what hit you. Well, not dead technically…

Anyway, moving on. I will let a shiny ninja fart loose on the world and people will look at me puzzled. You can see the gears turning in their heads, and then a laugh forms and it’s awesome. It’s like watching a storm form over a flat plain miles away. Sometimes, it leads to laughter that goes on for far too long and leaves me thoroughly embarrassed. My ninja farts have been quoted on social media instantaneously.

My sense of humor is, hands down, my best trait. I’m not sure if it evolved specifically as a survival mechanism when the monkey of life started trebucheting the tremendous stockpile of simian poo that has been my life experience at me, or if I would have had my sense of humor anyway, but it has gotten me through. It is responsible for my continued existence. If I didn’t have a sense of humor, if I couldn’t find the funny in a monkey poop trebuchet, I seriously would have offed myself by now. Life without humor isn’t life at all. It’s certainly not a life I want to live.

Anyway, the whole point of all this boasty business going on up there is that this walk-away-and-think-of-great-comeback-later thing doesn’t really happen to me. I can always blurt out something and it’s usually funny. There are times when I think of something even funnier later, but I usually get my jabs in at the time. Even if they’re not the funniest things I could have said, they’re still witty as shit (not that shit is very witty).

My closest friends and I have known each other for fifteen years or longer. We’re as comfortable with each other as people who aren’t boinking are ever likely to get. A few days ago, several of us were helping my best friend build a new sofa cover. Perhaps build isn’t the right word, but I know fuckall about sewing. My grandmother, who I lived with most of my life, was a sewing teacher. She was a professional sewer, paid to teach children how to do that. I was a child who lived in her house and I don’t know how to sew. I can, however, rip the bloody hell out of some seams with a seam ripper. I was taking the old cushions apart while they were cutting the new fabric in the shape of the old fabric. To be perfectly honest, ripping seams and creating general fabric mayhem gave me great joy.

My best friend was talking to someone about how she was sure that the old fabric pieces were all marked so that we could easily put them back together. “I am 100% sure,” and 2.4 seconds later, “I am 90% sure…” I snarked in with something like, “You’re 90% sure that 50% of the pieces are 40% labeled.” She said, “I am 90% sure that I will stab you in the face.” And that, dear readers, is why my best friend is my best friend. I had no comeback because there is no comeback for that, no matter how long you think about it, since she had clearly won. I just laughed, which incidentally, was the appropriate response.

I am entirely certain that the odds that my best friend would stab me in the face are way less than 90%. If she was actually going to stab me, it would probably be in the torso.

The other side of my awesome funny is that, because it is so fast and streamlined like a pro athlete ninja, I don’t often have a chance to think about what I’m saying before I say it. I say things that I instantaneously wish I could take back. So, instead of a walk-away-and-think-of-great-comeback-later thing, it’s more of a walk-away-and-wish-I-hadn’t-said-that thing.

My best friend has been a witness to my blurty ninja farts more than anyone else. There are times that she could stab me in the torso for speaking before I think. Usually this has to do with negotiation. My best friend is an extremely skilled negotiator and I have destroyed more than one transaction with my blurts. I talked about that in the post Inappopriate Comment Syndrome. I have mostly learned to keep my fool mouth shut while she’s negotiating. If at all possible, I will walk far enough away that I can’t even hear the conversation, because my mouth is not to be trusted.

At the same gathering where we were building a sofa cover, someone mentioned crack cocaine in relation to how addictively delicious deviled eggs are. I was in the process of making some.

I offhandedly said something about how I used to be a homeless crackhead prostitute and I can verify that deviled eggs are every bit as addictive as crack. I smiled as if I had just made a joke. Both of the friends that heard me did not smile, but looked at me in horror. Apparently, being a homeless crackhead prostitute isn’t funny. Who knew?

So, while I never worry that something I said wasn’t the funniest comeback of all time only to have the funniest comeback of all time saunter in hours later, I do wish I had the capacity for thought before speech, since my intended wit can make things unintentionally awkward.