The best and quickest way to become the butt of someone else's joke is to have no sense of humour about yourself. That is the lesson of Malvolio, a character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the victim of a wicked joke. He's so serious about himself, so self-important, he invites the jest.
I bring this up because it's so easy to get caught up in our passions and obsessions that we often forget to lighten up, as the expression goes.
Humiliation is an excellent salve for this. You wouldn't want to make a habit of it, but it does help to regain perspective on things. And, let's be honest, it can be very, very funny. A word of caution though: be sure you're the first to laugh.
Following years of inadvertently comic personal debacles, I can attest to this. I can also say that I've realized there is nothing funnier to me than me.
Besides, in a world of fools the people who have the most fun are the self-aware fools. To quote a Neil Innes song, "How sweet to be an idiot, how sweet ..."
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