Do You Know Who I Am?

During the pandemic, at the urging of my former therapist who thought I was funny, I started a line of t-shirts and other products. I adorned them with sayings like Where’s my epiphany? and YOU try growing old gracefully.

Funnily enough, I’m terrible at marketing and never did anything to promote them so they continue to sit on Etsy with hardly any sales. However, over the years, the one that has sold is Do You Know Who I Am?.

The slogan came to me from when I was teaching in the county jail and one of my students, a gang leader, got mad at me for telling him to do his work.

Do you know who I am? he said, coming up on me threateningly.

Without stopping to think, I said, Do you know who I am?

Luckily, he was so caught off guard that he laughed and switched gears.

I’m puzzled by why this slogan is the one that’s grabbed people the most. Is it because we live in the Age of Narcissism (not my intention to promote)? Because, like my student, people get the irony? For me, Where’s My Sock? is a lot funnier, as is, especially for a baby, a bib that reads, It Wasn’t Me. (I made the mistake of sending this as a gift for the newborn of a colleague, who never thanked me.)

I’m sort of a transplant here in the US and maybe it’s simply a matter of living in a country where irony is not threaded into the culture. Maybe it’s too British or Jewish, I mused. So I asked an Israeli friend, Do you think these shirts would go down well in Israel?

No, she said with great adamance. They don’t have a sense of humor, and if they do, it’s more on the silly, like people falling down.

I have to admit, seeing Peter Sellers falling over couches in his Pink Panther movies always makes me burst out laughing.

But back to the point, much of the popular British humor I was exposed to as I was growing up was also silly, full of bodily function jokes.

So where do I go to find my comrades in irony? A friend thinks I may have some French in me, the great purveyors of ironical discourse as they are. My last, and first, name, may lend that suggestion as well. As the story goes, my great great great x whatever Jewish grandfather apparently was from France and deserted from Napoleon’s army invasion into Russia and stayed there. The nomenclature Margo was more random; my parents went to a ballet the night before I was born and saw Margot Fontaine perform (did they see the t?) and landed on that.

Honestly, many people don’t get my humor. Whether they’re listening, I can’t always tell. My partner tells me it took her ten years to realize I was funny. Luckily, we’ve had many more years of her laughing at my quips, when she’s not too busy. And sometimes when in company, should I say often, I make the mistake of not reading the room, inciting stone silences.

I can see how Do you know who I am? speaks to people as a ubiquitous comeback to being treated like a persona non grata, like for one woman who bought 14 mugs to be sent to her work address and someone else who sent her mother a tote bag as a gift for Mother’s Day. It can also come in handy on a practical level: I wear the shirt, in black with large white lettering, whenever I have a medical procedure in case I leave with the wrong part of my body missing.

But why isn’t Half of me is happy or What wouldn’t my inner critic say appealing to people? Or what I made for my whirlwind of a partner in our ever-faster paced world, I was here a minute ago?

As we recently went through our expenses to prepare for taxes, my partner marveled at how many sales I made as the revenue shows on our bank account. I had to confess that it was me buying shirts for friends, who thankfully share my sense of humor. I mean someone has to.

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