Thanks for Listening: Humor is a Necessity!

William Leroy Kennedy
Sep 3
2 min read

A hometown acquaintance explained that being funny was a necessity during his prison stay because it kept the other inmates from thinking about taboo subjects.

As we stumble through life, a little levity can go a long way towards smoothing things out. My first remembrance of humor helping me out was my dad asking my three-year-old self to find my damned shoes. After looking, I said in front of his friends, “Daddy, I can’t find them damned shoes!” His friends burst out laughing.

As teenagers, we would load my younger five-year-old brother, James, who inherited my dad’s photographic memory, with jokes, then put him on the phone with girls. He’d loosen them up, then we would finish the conversations. Later, as an adult, he confessed to calling the girls back and explaining what we were up to, and the girls became his girls.

From fifth grade to tenth grade, we lived in the Long and Lowe public housing in Sheffield, AL. There, using humor to tame situations down became a necessity, so it was important to learn how to assert ourselves comedically and otherwise.

By going to the movies at least three times a week, I gained plenty of the material needed to joke with aggressive types. It did not always work, so I got into a few fights. One man’s family attended professional wrestling matches every week. Within seconds, he had me spinning above his head. Afterwards, I decided fighting was not for me.

By moving to Texas for college, I really had to step up my game. Many thought that being from Alabama made me inferior because dogs and water hoses had been used on Black Alabamians. Getting folk to smile was my number one objective when conversing with fellow students.

Upon graduating and taking a job with Boeing in Bay St. Louis, MS, helping to test fire the first stage of the Saturn (Moon) Rocket, the need for humor doubled. As the first Black engineer there, I had to sell myself and become better than others at getting the job done. My first assignment was to spend $50,000 on a project; otherwise, the money would not be appropriated the following year.

The project was to build a restroom for women in a concrete and steel structure that was the tallest building in MS at the time. In the previous design, the walls were so low that the men could look over them at the women! I had to design a women's bathroom that fit into an existing space - a stairwell. And, yes, I became known as the “Shit House Engineer!" However, I did well enough to get a 17.5 percent raise after my first year with the company!

Thanks for listening!