A woefully incomplete analysis of “funny”
You know what’s funny? It’s when something out of the ordinary happens. This in itself makes for a decent “joke” due to its reference points and its contextual shift, but falls on its face for the same reason as this does: “I eat my hot dogs cold, no bun intended”.Jokes are usually stories of situations that wind up going in unexpected directions. Sometimes jokes include scatological references, racial stereotypes, or sexual innuendoes because the shock value of these references adds to the situational unexpectedness. Jokes that rely heavily on these plebeian morphologies are generally cause for one to abandon their company and go in search of someone who will be quiet, somone with anything else to say, or no one at all; in any case, an exodus guaranteed to be a more enriching experience, and an overall good move.
Punchlines are the end parts of jokes. A punchline’s purpose is to highlight and conclude the stories (or to rejoin the proposed questions), in unpredicted ways. More generally they tend to throw the introductory segment of the joke into sharp relief. It is necessary to point out that in our information-soaked times, punchlines are normally not unexpected, and can usually be predicted in advance, given enough time. I think we’ve all experienced an instance in which someone was telling us a joke and their comic timing sucked so badly that we had plenty of time to come up with a great punchline on our own, our punchline being different and better than the intended one. We got a kick out of it, they didn’t, and that’s another type of joke. The joke “on” someone else, made all the more gratifying by the teller’s obviously unpredicted new role as listener. Because we are tired of jokes we spoil everybody else’s. Hecklers try to do this sometimes at comedy clubs, and the performers normally wind up embarrassing them as a result of the fact the heckler is already at a disadvantage, being without a microphone and an ability to make themselves laugh in the first place, hence their attendance at a preplanned event of funnyness. But the heckler’s plight is one we all understand. He is frustrated by his situation and cries out. “Why can I not be as funny as this comedian?”, he asks himself. He is then moved to pipe up and draw attention to himself. He can, of course, easily be as funny as the performer, but he has chosen the wrong moment to try, and he will pay for this in embarrassment, which he surely had coming.
Another type of joke is a practical joke. This type of joke doesn’t rely on words to carry it off. It’s also called a prank, and consists of an act of mischief, which can be either good-natured or malicious, and as a result can usually be construed as either. If someone comes home and finds their furniture is glued to the ceiling, they can be pretty sure someone’s played a practical joke on them. Practical jokes rely on the juxaposition of two conditions of reality rather than of two modes of speech, which is why they are much more rare, and much funnier. (Not to obfuscate the issue at hand, “funnier” in this case means more likely to elicit a laugh. Being likely to elicit laughter is only one definition of funny, others include “odd”, “insolent or impertinent”, “facetious”, and “attempting to amuse”. While it must be said that all these conditions are in bed together under the blanket of unexpected, the last is, sadly, far from funny. “Attempting to amuse” means it didn’t amuse and therefore wasn’t funny in any other way, and definitively implies that someone who failed to be funny in all other ways can still be funny for the very reason that he isn’t. People who understand the english language often encounter difficulty in using it, because it’s increasingly designed to mean syntactically more in the sense of its facile utility, and thereby syntactically less in the sense of well-formed, logical, and realistic. In fact, when the meaning of syntax itself is bifurcated in this way, we might just be better off starting over from scratch, or if you watch television shows about cavemen or indians, “ugh.”)
Because I’m a bad writer, I need more punctuation than I should. I need punctuation that pulls an idea out of parentheses and adds it back into the main subject heading, because that’s what I did and it looks all jumbled up and thrown together, which it is. Fortunately for me, everything everywhere is jumbled up and thrown together, but we have to carry on as if it wasn’t.
Another thing that can be called funny is seeing things as funny that aren’t intended to be. This process can be drawn out ad absurdum, and is usually a sign of burgeoning psychosis rather than perspicacity. Please ask a crazy homeless laughing guy for examples.
Humor is intended to cause amusement, so it doesn’t have the sharp crackle of an unanticipated joke and is thus less irritating on the whole. “Humorists” includes reputable writers such as P.G. Wodehouse, his protégé Douglas Adams, and if stretched, Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner, and even Vladimir Nabokov, but the last three fall under the subcategory “black humorists”, and “black humor” is not something anybody really understands, to the best of my knowledge, the inner workings of well enough to effectively flesh out. “Humorists” also regrettably holds James Lileks and Garrison Keillor in the palm of its itchy hand. These two cannibalize all that is admirable about “humor”, and if there were no such thing as the word “humorist” for them to be called, they would probably be doing a smash-up job bagging my groceries and would periodically stare into the distance wondering what was missing from their lives. Humor is an art, and agile minds perform it with grace, using language to construct ideas of all the kinds and scales that can be gently bent out of their shapes and given new, tickling meanings and shades. Good humor can’t be deconstructed in less words than it takes to repeat verbatim, so I won’t bother analyzing it (nor would I dare give myself credit for being able to), because good humor is a highly developed form of rhythmic musical language, in other words, a poem. I’ll have to strain not to turn this into a polemic against the continuing crisis of that dirtbag shitball warhawk nerd Lileks’s internet cult following, and instead will move on to the problem with funny.
The problem is that the market’s expectations for humor are low. We want a chuckle, and that’s what we get, nothing more. The fact that Keillor and Lileks can be popular is what’s to blame. The market created them as what they are, legitimate sellers of ideas, and the market’s constituents are idiotic, apathetic, and therefore impossibly easy to which to pander. See the wild popularity of scatological, racist, and sexual innuendoes for details. To conclude this exercise, it must be said, in fairness, the James Lileks and Garrison Keillor do "attempt to amuse", so they are at least technically, funny, and at most really, blowhards with nothing of value to add to the public discourse.
Anyway, I’ve gone on too long, so have a great day and drop me an email to tell me about all the great stuff I’m missing on the internet. Newman does. He sent me this, a virtual knee surgery.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home