I've been asking this question since i first started commenting on the Huffington Post. I was having a discussion with one of my best friends ive never met yesterday but got tired of having to wade through 17 pages of comments to reply. I hate rereading my comments because the typos and stupidity makes me cringe. Why don't i take the time when posting to reread my comments and eliminate those glaring errors i hear you asking. mostly because i'm in a hurry to either get the thought out of my head before its replaced by something else, or I'm just to lazy to care.
While i am in no way a scholar or cultural anthropologist, I think that a culture can in some ways be defined by their comedy. Don't get me wrong republicans can come up with some funny lines. I have yet to run into one that is consistently funny. They seem to come at comedy from a different angel.
my friends theory is :
"I think that's why so much of our debate is based in comedy vs fear. It's really a debate about mindsets. About how we confront troubles and about how we see other people. If we can laugh at fears, we disable them. Reacting to fears is the way to empower them. Those are the differences of mindset between those who change their world and those who fear changes will lead to a worse world.”
I agree with him, but i also think that its more than that. Some people say that comedy comes from adversity. republicans are humans they too must have suffered from adversity. But rather than finding the humor in it. they find the pain. Funny people see the pain, but find a way to make it somehow funny. I will have to find a name for it, but its the wheel that rolls out of a 20 car pile-up and wobbles to a stop. its when after falling off a cliff and breaking every bone in your body you look to they sky to thank your maker it can't get any worse and a birds shits on your head. its the final straw that makes humans laugh. Just when you think it can't get any worse it somehow manages to. Thats where the comedy comes from adversity. Not the worse that has happened, but the universe saying "Hey while your down.I think ill give you just that little edge to let you know I'm still paying attention." its an optimistic pessimism that finds the funny. your boat is sinking into the ocean, all hope of rescue is gone and it starts raining. Thats comedy from adversity. those that see it die happy, those that don't die pissed.
I think most conservatives die pissed. their comedy comes not from irony but from meanness. they don't see that bird shit on the victim as funny. they see it as a serves em right. Divine comedy becomes divine justice to them. They seem to see the universe as something that dispenses justice. I see it as something there just to fuck with me. I don;t see it as a plan I see it as a chance to take a shot. So pessimism seems to be funnier. mean is never funny. smartassidness is for example.
Honey does this dress make my ass look fat?
conservative. response. " Yes, but thats OK because considering you eat like a pig, it does hide the curly tail"
Liberal response " no but your ass makes that dress look big."
ones just plain mean the other dripping with smartassousity. Both responses will ear you a night alone but one is funny the other just plain mean.
Comedy should be used to make you think not just feel. I think thats where the cons go wrong. they don't look for the comedy behind the joke, just the punchline. True comedy lies in the set up more than the punchline. To get to the other side means nothing without know that the chicken was on the wrong side to begin with. Libs will look at what causes the pain, cons only look at the pain itself.
This being said, who lets chickens loose near a road anyway?
Ah, Typo- you have nailed it into a nutshell- nicely done! I have the same opinion, and the same sense of humor. Keep it up, my friend I've never met! It's gloriosky! Barb/msbadger
ReplyDeleteAs the friend who posted that comment, I have to say your reply here is much more than a friend had any reason to hope for.
ReplyDelete"I will have to find a name for it, but its the wheel that rolls out of a 20 car pile-up and wobbles to a stop. its when after falling off a cliff and breaking every bone in your body you look to they sky to thank your maker it can't get any worse and a birds shits on your head."
Bingo. There's something weirdly funny about the unexpected crap which visits you right after the tragedy. My friend Russ, who is Texan but nevermind, said tragedy is a man jumping from a cliff. Comedy is a thousand men leaping from the same cliff with red noses.
It's much the same idea of suffering with the unexpected thrown in. It doesn't diminish the tragedy, it actually makes sense of the scale of suffering because we're not fit to fight the reality of a thousand men plunging to their death without the red noses. Somehow the silliness of clowns doing tragedy is funny while the sadness of real people doing those same things for real is horrifying to imagine.
Why the posters on HP are generally funnier on the left than the right I have not really understood in terms of other things. I've tried because it's a serious interest in humor and just what it means to have humor in dark times.
Why, as you point out, con humor relies on degrading others for the laughs, rather than something which relies on laughing at problems themselves is something worth a research grant.
As a footnote, can I say what a pleasure it is to be quoted on your blog as a friend.
:D
Love you buddy.
a thousand clowns jumping off a cliff is not so much funny as just a good start. them landing on the lawyers i stole that joke from is funny.
ReplyDeletebut your point is valid. I think comedy comes not from seeing the absurdity in reality but the reality in the absurd.
LOL...
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing an interview with novelist Tom Sharpe. He wrote some savagely funny books. He was asked about dark humor. He said he heard a story from WWI. These two guys are in the trenches.
One guy says to the other, Dave you haven't shaved.
Dave replies, what's the point? I'll be dead by sunrise. He cited it as a true story.
That's as dark as humor gets. Totally bleak. Somehow in these terrible circumstances people continue to function.
As you know my Mom passed away recently. It was comforting to be around family who all share a kind of common set of values. It was weird because we could cry and wail like kids and then laugh and share memories. That gap between sadness and levity was hard to understand even while experiencing it. I would not care to try and explain it to someone who didn't already have that kind of compassion. They could not understand how it is possible to laugh when your heart is snapped in two parts.
They would never understand how easy it is to smile at a great loss when that loss is shared by others. How there's love in that smile. How there's compassion in saying farewell with tears and laughter.
Human emotions are the hardest thing to figure out maybe. We do far better with chemicals and simple things like how gravity works on clowns falling over cliffs.
What we're lousy at, as a species, is understanding ourselves in any complex way. We suck at that. The great news IMO is that we're getting less bad in time.
tom Sharp is hilarious. my wife turned me onto the wilt series when i was living in the UK.
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