Laughter can represent joyous and fun occasions with friends or relatives, but it can also represent times of humiliation, embarrassment, and insecurity. Will Rogers said “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.” He could not have said it more precisely.

A while ago, I took a quiz in my class. The quiz had 14 questions, all of which contained matching and/or multiple choice answers. I began to panic about halfway through the quiz, due to the fact that I don’t test well. In a rush to finish the quiz and get rid of that extremely uncomfortable feeling, I quickly filled in my answers and turned the quiz into the teacher. Trudging back to my seat, I heard him gasp and I knew I had done awfully. One by one the other students turned in their quizzes. I saw my teacher take out his red pen, and begin grading. He kept marking with his pen, occasionally shaking his head, and then calling out the pupil’s name to show him or her the score and then put it in the grade book. When he got to one paper in the pile, he made many, many marks on it. Surprisingly his pen didn’t run out of ink. He called my name, and my heart dropped to my stomach. Other students had seen him mark up the paper and knew just as well as I did that the score weighed in at far below average. Snickers accompanied my trembling feet as I approached his desk.

“I’ve never seen a person guess all of the answers wrong on a test before.” he said mockingly, “It’s as if you haven’t been paying attention.” He knew that I found History, my second favorite class, to be one of the most tolerable in the school day. I would soak up all of the information and sometimes search on the Internet for more. I felt humiliated, and for him to have said that to me in front of the entire class could have been classified as a form of torture. Behind me I heard a chorus of laughter erupt, and a few desks creaking back as my classmates rose up, calling “Let me see! Let me see!” I wanted to destroy that paper more than anything, but before I could even get my first look at it, my classmates poured over it like a pack of ravenous hyenas. I heard giggling, cackling, hooting, all forms of rib crunching laughter. I wanted to get out of there immediately. Although they were having a great laugh about my 0%, I felt embarrassed and insecure about my less that spectacular grade.

Will Rogers’ quote pertains to my situation perfectly. If the 0% quiz had happened to somebody else, I would have been a member of the laughing crowd. However, since I was the one under the magnifying glass, everything became very humorless, very quickly.