“Funny, did you hear that? Funny… That's me. I just keep them in stitches. Doubled in half.”

Funny. I’ve always been funny. The life of the party, the one with the sense of humor. That’s been my lot in life. I guess you could say my greatest role thus far is that of a clown.

I don’t take myself seriously very much. Life is too short to be serious. I love to laugh and to make other people laugh, to make other people feel joy for just a split second. It’s invigorating.

I can’t tell you when I first discovered the joy of making others laugh, but I know that I’ve been “funny” all my life. I’ve always been the kid to crack a joke or tell a humorous story when there’s a lull in the conversation.

I think that the "funny guy" is really all most people know about me. “Oh, Aaron, he’s so funny.” “Aaron’s a character.” “Aaron’s got the jokes.”

For the most part that’s fine by me. I can be the funny guy. All my life I’ve been the supporting character in other people’s lives including my own.

What I’m not sure a lot of people know is why I’m funny. Often times it’s said that the funniest people are the ones with the heaviest mask. No truer words have been spoken. Growing up my humor was used to hide the terrible lack of self-esteem I had.

I’ve previously mentioned my battles with poor body image and self-confidence. When someone laughed at a joke I told, it made me feel valued by that person. It made me feel that they didn’t see what I saw.

I also realized that if people thought you were funny, they wouldn’t ask you many questions about yourself, so you didn’t really have to bring up the demon’s that haunt you. It was perfect; I could feel valued and get away with not telling people about me.

Then I met people who started calling me on it.

These people, some of my favorite, saw through the humor and realized that there was something deeper underneath. They saw the pain, but more importantly for me they saw the beauty. They taught me that I had other things to offer. My warm heart, my passion for equality and my intellect on trivial things like the number of times Audra McDonald has won a Tony Award and for what shows (six, in chronological order: "Carousal," "Master Class," "Ragtime," "A Raisin in the Sun",""Porgy and Bess" and "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill") among other things.

They also made me realize that humor isn’t always the best thing, like when you’re trying to conduct an entire new-student orientation.

The purpose of my life isn’t to tell jokes, my value doesn’t lay in how good my punch line is. It’s in the way that I love. It's in the way that I give my all to everything. I don't need to be funny to be loved, I need to be loved to be funny.