Funny Bone: Not Funny, Not a Bone

Hit the inside of one of your elbows on the right spot and you’ll feel a tingling or prickly sensation. Do it hard and the sensation can feel like a dull pain shooting through the arm and into your fingers.

We call it the funny bone, but the pain actually comes from the ulnar nerve, not a bone at all. It’s the nerve that runs through the arm and down the inside part of the elbow. Its purpose is to transmit feelings to the brain from the pinkie and ring fingers. It’s also part of the nervous system that allows movement of the hand.

The funny or painful feeling comes when the ulnar nerve is bumped against the humerus—that’s the long bone located between the shoulder and the elbow. That contact with the bone causes no harm, but it can be annoying and sometimes uncomfortably painful.

Near the elbow, only skin and fat give the ulnar any padding. It’s the longest unprotected nerve in the human body.

People often reference the funny bone when talking about a sense of humor. The phrase It tickled my funny bone probably came from the close vicinity of the humerus and the similarity to the word humorous. It feels funny when you hit it. However, there’s no documentation available to verify this origin of the name.

The ulnar nerve is the cause of a not-so-funny affliction. Called the ulnar claw, the pinkie and ring fingers of either hand can curl up from muscle weakness in the forearm. A splint can provide pressure to the arm and help reduce the curling. Often surgery is required to correct the condition. Nothing’s funny about that.

Having a funny bone is natural, but having a sense of humor is an acquired characteristic of humans. A sense of humor is the ability to see the funny side of life and even death experienced by other people and ourselves.

My favorite example of a sense of humor is found in a scene from the 1948 movie “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” This dramatic adventure is set in 1920’s Mexico where three gold prospectors seek their fortunes. Humphry Bogart, Tim Holt and Walter Huston play the main characters.

Near the end of this excellent film, the Holt and Huston characters find that bandits cut open the bags of their hard-earned fortune.  The ignorant bandits thought the unrefined gold was simply sand. It scatters away in the stiff winds.

Huston begins laughing and explains to a stunned Holt that the joke is on them. The mountain took back all the gold they spent months working to get.

The scene goes on a long time with the two men just laughing. They get overcome by the irony of the wind taking the gold back to its origin.

Having a sense of humor makes life easier to tolerate. Even bumping your funny bone hard on the handle of the refrigerator seems tolerable when you have a sense of humor.

My next blog is about a precious American symbol—the Liberty Bell. Read how the bell was almost sold for $400.00 of scrap metal. That blog will be posted during the first week of September.

Thank you for reading this blog. See my web site at www.joevlatino.com. My book of short stories “The Device” is available on line and at Amazon.