Self-deprecating

Having a tendency to disparage oneself.

Last night, Anthony and I went to see Dar Williams in concert at a smallish venue in Brooklyn called Southpaw. It was part of his Christmas present (in addition to a book and a CD and a pair of pants. And a dustpan, but that's an inside joke.) It was a really good show, only the second time I'd seen Dar perform live. But Ant used to see her with some regularity, and hadn't in a couple years, so I thought it was a good present.

For those not in the know, Dar is a part of the modern folk scene. The other time I saw her was at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival a few summers ago, not long after Anthony and I started dating. Being a big festival, we were like a mile away, and her set was a bit shorter. Last night, though, she was very much up close and personal. (She also arrived rather late, and had to slip through the crowd outside to get into the venue, which was kind of funny, but she was maybe 5 feet away from us.) The thing about her performance, though, was not just that her songs are interesting and her voice beautiful, bu she is actually very funny, both with her lyrics and with her banter between songs.




This is one of the songs she played last night, very appropriate to a holiday weekend show. And very funny. I made a comment to Ant about that between songs, and he said that she is known to be very self-deprecating in her humor.She was talking about her hair not being quite the "holiday hair" that she wanted for the performance,the fact that she was wearing unflattering jeans, that the green gods were punishing her for taking her car to the show instead of public transportation (which is why she was late.) When I looked up self-deprecating in the dictionaries, it seemed that no one was acknowledging the fact that self-deprecation is most often used as a form of humor. I know it is not exclusively used for humor, but, really, the average person uses it more for humor than anything else.

I'm just saying, I think someone working at a dictionary needs to get on that.