Excellent point, Jeri; maintaining a certain sense of humor can be most helpful - if not requisite - to emotional survival. Not just as we relate to others, but with ourselves as well.

It seems that folks who take themselves very seriously don't spend a lot of time smiling, do they?

As to the "point counting" dialouge; we live in a Game-Oriented culture to some extent, and we are raised in the main to strive to "win" by making someone - if not everyone else - "lose".
I call it the "Football mentality", in which we are segregated into two basic social orders; the "Winners" and the "Losers". So I suppose that competitive behavior is somewhat innate to our species.

Personally, I see the social morphosis from "competition" to "cooperation" as the primary model of human interaction, as a positive developmental, if not evolutionary, passage.

Your "Shut Up and Sing" poem/song certainly has potential!

Where there's communication, there's usually Hope, I reckon - and Music is certainly a marvelous form of communication, to be sure.