Jessica Phillips

What makes me laugh is umm, er, I mean uh ...

Jessica Phillips knows exactly what makes her laugh. She just has a hard time describing it.

“The one thing that always makes me laugh is dry, sarcastic humor,” she said.

And she knows exactly where to find it. Phillips said the NBC sitcom, “The Office,” provides her with a seemingly endless sarcasm.

“When I watch ‘The Office,’ its dry, stupid humor,” she said.

Phillips said she always likes to laugh.

“I can’t take myself seriously, I have to laugh,” she said. “I don’t have any time to be serious and mad; life is too short.”

That philosophy served Phillips when she was a nurse in the University Hospitals Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, or NICU, helping care for sick or premature babies while tending to their concerned parents.

“I definitely had to use some type of humor when I was in the NICU,” Phillips said. “It’s a serious environment. If you took it so seriously, you’d have the most depressing job in the world.”

Phillips admits, however, that her affinity for sarcasm isn’t always appreciated by people around her.

“I don’t know if people get my humor sometimes because I’m very sarcastic,” she said. “They probably think I’m being rude. You have to get my dry humor to understand me.”

— Lee Hermiston

Iowa City Press-Citizen -- March 12, 2009