Now, Gentle Reader, would be an excellent time for you to use the mouse, or the keyboard, or whatever other device you have for controlling your browser, and move lightly on to some other site, perhaps one of the ones suggested in the previous thread. Because Your Humble Blogger is finally giving in to his urge to write a Disquisition on Humour, and as everybody knows, there is nothing more tedious than Humour. There are, of course, different types of humor, and to be truly tedious, a Disquisition on Humor must catalogue those types, giving dreary examples of each.\n
Humor of Recognition<\/b>: The astonishing Gilbert Gottfried, in one of his routines of many years ago, included a moment when he abruptly cut from his squawking persona and talked in the gently puzzled voice of a middle-aged man from the Bronx. “Why is he yelling,” Mr. Gottfried would insert. “Yelling isn’t funny. You know what’s funny? Funny is when the guy says ‘Don’t you hate it when this happens’ and you say ‘Yes, I hate it when that happens.’ That’s funny.” That’s the Humor of Recognition. Both the character in the joke and the guy in the audience who finds that joke funny. It’s (presumably) what people find funny about Cathy, or The Lockhorns. The Recognized thing can be exaggerated, but only within the bounds of recognition.\n
Your Humble Blogger, in his misspent youth, failed to find Humor of Recognition funny. I could recognize it, but it didn’t make me laugh, or even smile. In fact, my usual response was gritting my teeth and nodding. Yes, Ms. Guisewhite, women find trying on bathing suits stressful. You told me that yesterday. In the last few years, however, Humor of Recognition has started to grow on me. Jokes about child-rearing whose only point is that the listener recognize the situation, and consider how unfamiliar it was before one reared a child, suddenly became funny. It was disconcerting to find things funny that before I didn’t, but there it is. I can’t even dispute my own taste.\n
Humor of Incongruity<\/b>: This is, in some sense, the opposite of the humor of recognition, where we laugh because the thing is so utterly different than the world we recognize. That’s why it’s funny when a little kid wears those absurdly large novelty sunglasses. That’s why a red foam-rubber nose and big shoes are funny. That’s why a man in a nun’s habit is funny. That’s why a penguin on top of a television set is funny. Heck, that’s why a penguin is funny. This is the humor of most verbal jokes, which get their punch lines from the sudden realization that what had been recognizable was not, in fact, what you thought it was, and that the person was not actually selling window blinds, or that the fellow was looking for a corkscrew, or that it smells awful.\n
Now, astute Readers will be wondering: if things are funny because they are familiar, and things are funny because they are unfamiliar, doesn’t that mean that everything is funny? Quite right, Gentle Reader, or at least completely wrong, which is very close. Things are not actually funny because<\/I> they are familiar or unfamiliar. They are funny because they are funny, except the things that aren’t funny, which aren’t funny. Dividing funny things into different categories doesn’t explain why they work so much as it explains how they work, and it doesn’t explain that, either. Still, the idea is right insofar as it means that anything, anything at all, can be funny or can be the setting for something funny, or the set-up for something funny, or the punch-line, or the background, or the foreground, or the source. Anything can be exploited for gags. That doesn’t mean that any attempt to make a joke about the thing will be funny, or that you, Gentle Reader, will find any jokes at all on a particular topic funny, or anything like that. Theoretical humor is a long way from funny.\n
Besides, Humor of Recognition and Humor of Incongruity, despite between them incompassing all possible subjects, do not complete the classification of Humor. There is Humor of Ambiguity (where words, pictures or situations have two different and perhaps opposite meanings), Humor of Liberation (where a person gets away with saying or doing something they wouldn’t really get away with), Humor of Repetition (where what’s funny is that the thing is repeated, and I don’t know why that should be funny, but there it is; as Stephen Fry said, there are only two kinds of humor: Humor of Repetition and Humor of Repetition), Humor of Obscenity (Peepee! Ahahahahahaha!) and Humor of Humiliation (where some guy gets seltzer in the pants). Something can be funny because of any of these, or any combination of any of these, but that doesn’t mean that anything that repetitious, or humiliating, or liberating, or ambiguous, or incongruous, or recognizable will be funny.\n
In fact, not even all funny things will be funny. As I mentioned above, for many years I just didn’t find most Recognition jokes funny—\n
Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, there was a particular kind of Recognition joke that I used to like more than I do now, and that’s the Reference. The bit where what’s funny is simply that the speaker drops in a reference to something that I know, whether it’s a line from Monty Python, or a Shakespeare line, or the lyric to the opening theme for “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”. Or in Roy Lichtenstein’s witty paintings of interiors with great art on the walls. Or 98% of Shrek 2<\/I>, which would at one point probably have had me in stitches, but at this point in my life just made me tired. So that screws with my earlier point, but will help out my next one. OK, let’s go back.\n
In fact, not even all funny things will be funny. As I mentioned above, for many years I just didn’t find most Recognition jokes funny, and now I tend to chuckle. Funny is in the eye of the beholder, and even more than with beauty, the beholder will change his mind a lot. For that reason, I try not to come over all morally superior because somebody finds humor in something I don’t think is at all funny. Not only are my own tastes embarrassing even to me at times, but many of the people I admire have things funny that only make me shake my head, and yet miss the point of the really funny things. In fact, there is a broad stream of English humour that this Anglophile can’t get simply because I don’t find the concept of adultery intrinsically funny. So, look: funny, not funny, people are different one from another and that’s what makes the world interesting and fun. Right?\n
And yet, when it comes to Humor of Humiliation, I get all ... igry.\n
Digression: Igry, as every poolboy knows, is one of only three commonly-used words in the English language ending in -gry<\/I>. The others are augury<\/I> and dungaree<\/I>. Augury<\/I> is the word for the color of the soapy film one sees when one has poured lukewarm tea into an improperly washed coffee mug and let it sit overnight. That substance was used by the Berserker priests to create the Golem (or greek fire<\/I>), which ultimately allowed the Spartans to conquer Byzanteum. Dungaree<\/I> is a far older word, deriving from Jimmy Durante’s affectionate nickname for his nose. By the time Walter Winchell referred to Gropius’ pyramidical addition to the Louvre as “that dungaree doohickey of the Dardanelles”, the word had passed into common usage to describe any unattractive protuberance. End Digression.\n
We can more or less define igry<\/I> to mean something like dying inside of embarrassment, due to other people’s behavior<\/I>. When somebody does something wrong, I mean, painfully wrong, the observer who is wincing is feeling igry. The observer who is laughing his ass off is appreciating the Humor of Humiliation, although of course true igriness is occasioned when the person who ought to be humiliated is oblivious to the inappropriateness of their behavior. Teenagers standing next to their parents are bound to be feeling igry—not ashamed, not even properly embarrassed, just dying a little inside. What makes me feel igry is when people laugh at the poor humiliated sap in the Humor of Humiliation scene. I don’t just feel bad for the guy, I die a little from the laughter. Don’t laugh!<\/I> I scream silently, you’re only encouraging them<\/I>.\n
The true nightmare was when Meet the Parents<\/I> was the inflight movie. I was trapped. I didn’t watch. I turned the earphones to the bad music channel. I tried to keep my eyes on my book. But I would hear the guffaws circumjacent and couldn’t help looking up at the screen, just in time to see something awful happening to someone awful, and I would die a little. The sleep mask didn’t help, because then the guffaws led me to imagine what horrible humiliation was being suffered by the horrible people onscreen, which was no comfort at all. I didn’t care about the people onscreen, who of course didn’t exist, but those laughs, those awful, gleeful animal laughs... See, it’s really easy to convert a simple matter of taste in humor into a moral crusade.\n
Anyway, there it is. I think that, broadly speaking, the cultural moment leans toward Humor of Humiliation. It’s another thing that makes me wonder where I came from. I think—I think<\/I>—Humor of Humiliation is mean-spirited and nasty, and that it’s a bad sign for a culture when that humor becomes dominant. But I may well be misinterpreting the whole thing, and I can’t say I have done any quantitative research, or feel that such research would be possible. I remember somebody (perhaps it was Stephen Fry, or Oscar Wilde) saying that when the top comic switched from Calvin and Hobbes<\/I> to Dilbert<\/I>, it was a similar cultural landmark, from a free-spirited to a mean-spirited comic. I don’t know that I agree, but I can’t say it has been proved wrong.\n
So what do people find funny? What does our funny say about us, as a culture? I think funny is at the heart of our American culture, myself, but I don’t know how to get at it.\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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