Humor Me (Humor? Me?)

I am wondering now if it is appropriate to call what I do in my writing and my cartooning humor.  I tell stories.  As a school teacher in both junior high and high school, I told stories in class and made kids laugh.  (Okay, I admit, kids that age mixed with hormones, experiments with sex and alcohol, and under-developed frontal lobes in their brains will laugh at practically anything.  I know a teacher who crosses her eyes when talking to kids about their mistakes, and she has them rolling on the floor with giggle-fits.  This is now my fourth longest parenthetic expression, also known as an aside.  They would probably laugh about that.)  But is it fair to call that humor?

I write stories filled with feel-good crap.  I’m as likely to make you cry as I am to make you laugh.  (At least, that is my intention.  You may laugh at things I intend to make the reader sad, and be sad or nauseated by the things I think are funny.)  How does that fit with the definition of humor on the internet?  I get a big kick out of some humor blogs I found on WordPress.   http://https://irtfyblog.wordpress.com/  I Refuse to Follow Your Blog is a master complainer.  He disses and crabs and totally kicks butt about a number of things.  (Though I must admit I used his list of un-funny humor blogs to follow a few more that give me chuckles… What can I say?  I’m a contrarian at times.  How can you teach seventh graders and not be?)  http://https://buffalotompeabodyblog.wordpress.com/  Buffalo Tom Peabody not only rocks my rib-cage with his wonderful photo-shopped self-cat-portraits, he makes a really guffaw-inducing set of videos on YouTube.  http://http://bensbitterblog.com/  Ben’s Bitter Blog is blithely bitter and better at bitter than any bitter blogger blogging bitterly that I have ever found.  Ben blogs bitter better than other bitter bloggers who blog with bitter butter… (All right!  I know.  Alliteration by itself isn’t funny.  It took me tons of tempestuous years teaching to learn that.)  http://http://dougdoeslife.com/  Doug Does Life  does a blog with a monkey that you have to see to believe.  They all make me laugh and they all seem to know better than I how to do the humor shtick.  So how dare I call what I write humor?

After the Charlie Hebdo incident, (which you may have noticed has seriously bruised my cartoony little heart)  I have to take humor and comedy in a whole new, more serious light.  Ralph Bakshi, a master cartoonist whom I adore, says that if your cartoons don’t piss somebody off and make some enemies, then you’re doing it wrong, and you have to stop calling yourself a cartoonist.  He says you are just an illustrator… in my case a children’s illustrator.  Do I need to be insulted by that?  Am I not a humorist?  Am I not funny?  I will tag this lunatic post as humor even though it’s not funny… well, not funny funny… just funny odd.  Will I get in trouble with the cartoon gods for doing it?  (Wait a minute… cartoon gods?  Are they gonna zap me with a cartoon fun-bolt or hit me in the face with a pie or something?  If they send terrorists, it may elevate my status.)  So I am asking a whole lot of questions and not answering them myself like usual.  After all, who decides if this is humor?  Not I.