What does (sort of) surprise me is that I recall being equally amused by this trick when I was their age. I consciously remember seeing Justin Lipp do this same thing in the first grade, and I consciously remember that I respected him more because of it. At age 8, I thought that the concept of this pencil “moustache” was ingenious and original. While I like to think that my criteria for being ingenious and original have since evolved, I still do feel some level of childlike mirth when I see someone with a pencil on their face.
Here’s the thing that really gets me: Across cultures, and across generations, kids contort their faces for the exclusive purpose of holding a pen horizontally on their upper lip. Why? At what point in human history did we decide that it is hilarious to place a pen between your lip and your nose, and why is this such a tempting behavior to imitate? Who was the first person who looked at a pen and decided that the most obvious thing to do with it was to balance it beneath the nose? How is it that multiple kids who will never meet each other, from multiple cultures and across multiple generations can all pick up the same writing utensil and almost instinctively decide to use it as a facial accessory, as if it were the most natural thing in the world? Seriously, where did this idea come from, and why is it so common when it should seemingly be so rare?
People like to pride themselves on their individuality and uniqueness. We’re always looking for little ways to differentiate ourselves from the masses. We drive cars with individualized license plates, we order our coffee with unnecessary complexity, and we accessorize our cell phones to the point of ridiculousness, at least partially for the purpose of setting ourselves apart from the crowd. But somehow, the more that I see of the world, the less convinced I become that people are truly original in any meaningful way. When I look around a classroom, I can see pencils of varying shapes, sizes, and colors, some retractable and some wooden, but these details are unimportant, because the only relevant point is that I know these pencils are all going to end up on the same facial crevice. Sometimes, it takes a bunch of kids with pencils under their noses to make you realize that, at the end of the day, we’re all the same. We are all amused by incredibly simple and incredibly stupid things…and there’s comfort in knowing that…
