Does comedy have to be coupled with another genre to be good?

Someone wrote a blog entry last week that in part had to do with Knocked Up. She classified it as humor primarily, unless I missed something. I wonder though, was it primarily humor? It struck me as a dramedy, or half comedy, half drama. There's a love story in there so that's romance (a subgenre in many people's books for drama). That love story is an integral part of the movie and its plot. Is there a movie that is pure comedy that people really look at critically and say "I loved that movie"? I think it might be a requirement that comedy is coupled with another genre to create anything of substance. Some pure comedy genre movies that I'm thinking of include Monty Python, Blades of Glory, and Scary Movie type stuff. Some people might love this stuff, but it's pretty much a cult following or an "I have to be in the right mood" type of love. When was the last time a comedy or something primarily humorous was nominated for an award of substance like an Emmy or Golden Globe?
It makes humor seem meaningless unless attached to something else. Grawe talks about this same problem or presupposition. He talks about how Aristotle and other rhetoricians just wisked right by humor and comedy, not treating it seriously, denying it any enduring worth. He extends the argument saying basically, no wonder no great writers more than dabbled in it.
I guess this is a weird observation coming from Knocked Up. I mean it doesn't have all that much substance, maybe. Romance and comedy tend to have less serious consideration in the public eye in genre. Maybe the real message is just lost or the audience doesn't want to acknowledge it, make fun of it by saying that the message is become a baby daddy and then marry the mommy, yeah that's the way. How about people find love in really weird ways, but it's real. Too corny for a modern audience? Probably. Ridiculous? Maybe. But maybe not.
So back to the question: Does comedy have to be coupled with something to be at its best? I think probably, if it has a message.

The Rhetoric Part

It's been a long time since we've focused on rhetoric in this class. We hear a lot about humor, what's funny, what isn't and so on. Sometimes we talk about what works to make someone's point and what does and that is rhetoric talk. We don't say it though, the word rhetoric. The two words to some people might seem very different in terms of content and purpose at first glance. Rhetoric is very serious. Humor is light. Humor is "just for laughs" and Rhetoric is for a distinct purpose. These ideas however are just stereotypes, not fully shaped. The two, Rhetoric and Humor, fit quite well together. It seems that it is more and more important for even the speakers on the most serious topics to lighten the mood with some humor. How many of you think it would be inappropriate for a speaker on cancer or heart attacks to crack a joke before he talked about his prize winning research? Probably no one, although I remember when I was very young that my grandma used to talk about this: "When did it become o.k. for people to joke at things like this?" was what she was saying; she was a cancer survivor herself and thought it was profane, now though she's loosened a bit up, adjusted to the times.
So when did humor and rhetoric start fitting together so well? Probably always to some extent. I mean we've read A Modest Proposal, a work which was written a couple hundred years ago; this is a perfect example of humor and rhetoric. We talked extensively about if this worked however. Did his backwards argument really convince us or if it did that, was it enough to convince us to do something about it? I guess the one thing that I mentioned above about speeches needing humor is quite different from this. The humor is just a sidebar. It serves a different purpose. It's entertainment in the midst of serious stuff; it's not integral material to the speech itself. It is not to convince. I think these differences are also the differences between today and then. We still have Modest Proposal-esque arguments, but the sidebar stuff is sort of new. I'm sure that in earlier years when people gave speeches, it was straight up; it was serious throughout.

Bill Bur and Standards

One person in our class wrote a blog entry on Bill Burr and the gender standards that our society enforces. For instance, men cannot hit women, but women can hit men. Apparently we can get away with property destruction too. The gap is even larger with foreign students I think. It's really nice in a way, but it's also really funny. I don't care if any of the "traditions" stick and hence I mean to make fun of them, but I don't want any one to think I'm making fun of what are just viewed as nice things guys do for girls. If intentions are in the right place, it's cool. No harm, no foul. It doesn't mean that some of the situations aren't funny though because the motions are becoming archaic in our society.
For instance, I think I could hold open a door all day for one of my European or Asian male friends and they would stand outside all day long if I didn't go in first. And vice versa: they won't go in when they're holding the door until I do. As a matter of fact I've had an entire mob of European guys just halt behind me like I was an army captain or something when I stopped to get some gum from my pocket before I went in the door to the gym.
I also mentioned playing soccer in my comments to the previous person who wrote on this subject. You would swear they killed your dog by how profusely they apologize after they barely graze your leg trying to get the ball in a game.
Then there are somethings that are downright annoying, not nice yet archaic traditions like, "Wow, she's good for a girl." Do we really need the prepositional phrase on the end?

p.s. Wear gym shorts constantly and call them dude on occassion. It'll freak them out. Then go find a nice phonebooth (like the one in Brown's poetry this week) and laugh.

A Straight Female Stand-up Comic Please

I've been looking for a stand-up person to do for my analysis for far too long. I did finally decide on one, but the search was the interesting part. I don't exactly have the deepest of backgrounds in stand-up. I'm much more familiar with SNL style skits or feature length movies or farcical novels. I'm not the person who turns on their TV and channel 69, Comedy Central is on. That said I still love comedy of course. Stand-up isn't that mainstream however, unless you count Letterman or Leno or Conan or that Irish guy, but they're more talk show host than stand-up act. Occasionally they do have a stand-up on. Letterman for instance has Robin Williams on to do stand-up about a month ago. Typically however, I've heard people comment "Must be a slow night" if a stand-up is on.
Anyway, what I want to talk about is my search for a stand-up comic. It was difficult because all of the obvious ones were on our syllabus. We can do those people, but I was looking for someone different. When that turned up fruitless, I just made one requirement: I wanted to do a straight woman stand-up comedian. Why? Because as evidenced by our syllabus, there aren't many and because I suffered through the whole of Margaret Cho's Assassin hoping it would get better (there went an hour of my life I will never get back). I vaguely remembered her being funny somewhere else. Not so much. Many other female options were lesbians and I'm just not willing to sit through something like that again. I don't "get it". It's for a very specific audience I guess. Very literally, Cho's performance was not for everyone.
The main issue that just frustrated and confounded me however was this: (a) Why are there so few women comedians and (b) why does it seem like the majority of them are lesbians?
I mean there's Rosie, Cho, Ellen and so on. I have nothing against that choice, but it's a strange social conundrum of the proportions of the question: Why is the percentage of black in sports so much higher than their percentage in the normal population? Is it genetic? Is it a societal factor? No one can really be sure for the latter question.
I guess that having that particular attribute gives them another thing to play off of in their acts. It's easier to make fun of a group when you are part of it, as we have said in class. It gives you permission. It makes it ok. Still, I can't answer why there are so few other famous women comedians. I guess the patriarchy is alive and well. It's the same question colleges like MIT ask themselves when 95% of their entering class is guys and not women. Why do certain professions still lean toward male dominance? Why comedy? Ladies, this needs to be fixed.

The Full Monty? Funny Idea...Not So Funny Use

The movie The Full Monty was more like "The suggestion of a full monty". It was amazing when I watched this that a movie with the name "full monty" never really showed it. I guess our standards today are a little bit different. We can walk into a movie not expecting to see it as much as we do, for example, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. They showed the full monty so many times in that movie that even most guys I know with a very high nudity tolerance couldn't take it. It is common place to see it. That is why it surprised me that this movie did not show its title.
Other than that, I was also a little bit surprised that such a funny idea could be turned into something sort of serious and sad. It wasn't laugh out loud funny for me. I mean the plot is really sad. It's this out of work dad who can't pay child support any more and is about to lose custody. It's about a chubby guy who doesn't think his wife loves him any more because he can't find a job either. It's about an old man who can't find a job before his wife figures out that he has been lying about being employed and all their things are taken away. There is a kid seeing stuff he probably shouldn't be seeing.
If this was supposed to be a comedy, why is it so heavy? Is it just an older style? I mean this movie was made before I think any of us in this class were born. When we saw Idiocracy, you didn't stop to think or feel sad. In this movie on the other hand, it was sort of unavoidable. Some theorists believe that comedy has a short shelf life (10-20 years for Grawe for instance). This could account for the difference. I don't really want to take this as a set rule however. I like to think that at least some comedy is universally funny. Some social situations (for example gender jokes) never really change. The problem is however that I cannot think of a really old comedy that I laughed at. I guess if I had to use an example, I would use the play A Midsummer Night's Dream, not as a whole, but the part with Bottom and crew, but that was mostly only funny once I actually saw a performance and had some idea how this scene might have been acted out. Even then however, the scene is an interpretation by modern people of what it might have been like, which might qualify it as comedy made in the last 10-20 years.

Grawe's Theory and the Need for New Examples

I started thinking about Grawe a little big more today, the theorist who says that comedy is anything that tells us that humans will survive. His theory is old and many of his references seem incredibly odd to a reader today. When asked to name some comedies, no one shouts off Shakespeare, Star Wars and Mr. Magoo. Also, unless we were all taking this class, I wonder how many of us would have understood the Charlie Chaplin examples. I doubt too many people in the class know who the Waltons are enough to have understood why Grawe was using that show as an example. There seems to be a problem with his examples. It's not just that they seem to be too broad, which I have addressed in another blog; it's that they are not current. I mean Charlie Chaplin is referred to as "new comedy" and that doesn't exactly resonate with a society that finds it increasingly hard to find World War II veterans to speak in history classes and the like because they are dying off. In other words, many of Grawe's examples are a lifetime away. Very few people living can say, "Oh, yeah I remember movies without audio" like Chaplins. In fact Letterman made fun of this fact when he was mocking John McCain not too long ago. He was speaking as if he was John McCain, "I don't like those new-fangled noisies" a.k.a movies with sound, actors speaking and such. It was meant to show how ancient John McCain was. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that these examples are outdated and we need new ones in order to understand Grawe's theory.
It is ironic that Grawe says that comedy only has a 10 to 20 year shelf-life. Someone did say, "Do comedy theories have shelf life too?". I don't think all of them do. The more metaphysical and less example laden ones can stand the test of time intact to some extent. Grawe's theory has a shelf life in so much that his theory is heavily based upon examples. If we culled just the outright theory from the entire piece, we might have a theory that stands the test of time, and I think this is probably possible.
Here is one idea of a good example: Legally Blonde. This movie, although goofy and ridiculous, asserts that life will go on. Elle loses her boyfriend who thinks she is too dumb for him. Then she joins law school and people think she won't survive. She does survive; she even thrives and she's perfectly pink while she does it. I'd like to hear other people's ideas for more updated examples to supplement the pure theory of Grawe if anyone has ideas.

Laughter v. Happiness?

Watching Burr's performance, "Why Do I Do This?", on Wednesday, one thing still sticks out to me. It was obvious that on one point, he has his jokes locked and ready to go. Then he tested the audience and the audience wasn't responding the way that he wanted them to, and he had to regroup a bit. This probably happens with other stand-ups, no doubt it does to all of them at sometime, but this is the first of it that we have really seen in the videos we have watched. The particular issue that he has to skip over because the audience wasn't responding was unhappy families. In their rejection of his jokes, he replies, "You must all have happy families, huh?". Typically, from what I have seen previously, the audience responds to a joke like this a little bit. His audience was rather cold however and it was more of a time wasting sentence while he regrouped and transitioned or locked and loaded his next set of jokes.
This led me to the question: If everyone were happy, would we laugh less on the aggregate? It seems like a paradoxical idea, but much of the comedy that we have seen has been a response to evils and wrongs in the world, some more light hearted than others. For example, in George Carlin's newer stand-up (the one with the grave stones) his main concern is consumerism. If people were happy with the way things were, no one would be laughing. If there wasn't a problem, namely consumerism, what would Carlin joke about? All of Carlin's stuff is about some sort of problem. His most famous stand-up act is about the problem of language and "The Seven Words You Can't Say". Problems make people unhappy, but comedians offer relief from that unhappiness with laughter. Idiocracy functions on the same "making a problem funny" model.
This particular type of comedy seems in line with Freud's idea that we laugh in order to deflect pain, to not really deal with overwhelming problems, and thus we don't develop anxiety disorders and such. If we don't have these problems however, if we don't have at least small anxieties, if everyone is happy then, how does Freud's theory work? Would there be no laughter in a totally happy world? Laughter and happiness seem to go hand in hand and it is odd to think that one could oppose the other.

SNL, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Stand-up v. skits

I missed SNL this week, and so I was thinking about it. I don't know if it was supposed to be old or new. I hope it was old. I could watch the show online, but everything is broken up into skits and that gets annoying to keep pressing play every five minutes. This is the thought process I went through and then I started thinking about the homework that we have for Monday: Watch Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy, both of which were on SNL. This is good enough for my replacement television watching I guess. But anyway, I got to thinking, they had to make a pretty big transition between stand-up comedy and doing skits. How do they do it? Were they doing stand-up and the skits simultaneously? Is stand-up something you cease to do once you are on a television show and then you cease to do the television show once you star in a few movies?
My main thought process however was in making the transition. I actually was in a school play rendition of some of the old really classic skits. We just picked and chose the ones that we liked. We did some Matt Foley skits, Barbara Wa-Wa, etc. I was type-cast as the sarcastic one. If that's what a skit called for, I did it. The slightly terrifying thing about being the default sarcastic character however is the fact that you have to do a lot of monologues. It's almost like stand-up. You don't have other characters to play off of sometimes. No one to pick up a line. Nothing. Like one skit I did, my "husband" was raking leaves in the "backyard" while I had the spotlight on me admonishing his great work ethic coupled with the brain of a pigeon which equated to me, in that fictional world, having to do all the work. On the whole however, most SNL skits are not like this. Most of them have multiple actors from the show in one skit.
I did some other skits like the Matt Foley skit and I was the daughter of the couple who were trying to shape up their kids with Foley's "I live in a van down-by-the-river speech". So, in sum, I know the difference between working alone and working with other people. The latter is far easier because there's someone staring at you as if to say "your turn". The lines are shorter and you know relatively well what to expect to come next. You know what they are going to say and if they are decent actors, how they are going to say it and how you need to react. On the other hand, when doing a monologue or stand-up, you are just praying for the audience to interact with you the way that you want. You want to make them laugh at the right points and so forth, but you never really know how the night will go. I did three nights of SNL for my school play, each night some skits stayed the same and some of my skits changed so that we would get more people to come. The skits that stayed the same however, always got slightly different reactions even though I acted it out relatively the same, giving the script the same interpretation as the night before.
The two forms are sort of similar, stand-up and skits. Stand-up I think is probably much harder to do. I think if I am not mistaken, that both Rock and Murphy did stand-up before SNL. I could imagine that would be great comedic preparation for SNL. It's probably tougher.

Idiocracy and Audience

Did anyone feel self-conscious watching Idiocracy? Why do we think this is funny? I think partially why we think it is funny has to do with our sense of superiority and our adherence to the underlying message. We think we are better than any of the idiots in the movie. As college students, our mission (or at least or mission should be) to "do something with our lives" as Luke Wilson says so many times in the movie. That's what we are being trained to do right now. That's what we are preparing for.
Now there are a couple of different people that most of us can identify with in the movie, and this determines where the superiority/inferiority factor comes into play. Although Luke Wilson is totally average, I could imagine some people identified with him thinking ,"I'm just an average Joe", although technically speaking we should all be above average at this level in school. The other segment of people that some of us probably identified with is the high IQ couple, either the woman or the man. Although they seem slightly neurotic to me, they are probably closer to us in intelligence than any of the other characters (you can be humble here and say no, not really, but I know there are at least a few who can identify with someone with a 141 or 138 IQ or yours is at least closer to that than 100, the average). The vast majority of people however are in the middle of the two, Luke Wilson and the married couple. It is an unidentified group in the movie, but it is there. We have no characters to portray "in the middle" of these two characters. I think "in the middle" is where the vast majority of us belong or at least we think that is where we belong.
It is a sort of plot that the movie makers have against us. We assume with our super-inflated egos that we are in the middle of Luke Wilson's character and the married couple. But take a step back. Does anyone think the movie seems incredibly cerebral? Not really. Why are we, 75th percentile people ("in the middle" as I have said above), watching this movie that probably anyone could understand, even someone with an IQ below average? We inadvertently become stupid by deigning to watch anything this dumbed-down. This movie was not made for geniuses. No movie that sells well is. And so the joke is on us courtesy of the movie makers. Your flattering superiority is blown to pieces.

What Genre Do Mr. Magoo, Star Wars, and Twelfth Night All Fit into? The Grawe Riddle.

When I was in my freshman year of high school, I remember asking the teacher, "Why are Shakespeare's plays called comedies?" I got an answer that satisfied me for the time, but confuses me now because Grawe seems to be attempting to integrate the two completely separate definitions of comedy that I thought I knew. The first definition of comedy defined comedy as something that was funny and made people laugh, plain and simple. The second definition, the one I learned after asking the question above, was that a comedy was anything that ended happily, wasn't too gory, and usually ended in marriage, as do most of Shakespeare's comedies. I thought of these two definitions as separate entities. I'm sure under scrutiny these definitions could use refining, but I've never really had occasion until now to scrutinize them.
Grawe's definition of comedy sounds very different in words than either of the two mentioned above; it is defined as something that reassures us that "humans will survive". Why does he need something so broad? I'm still not quite sure, but one thing I do know is that his examples are examples that fit into either one or the other of my own definitions. For example, Mr. Magoo fits into my first definition; it is something that makes people laugh. On the other hand, Shakespeare's comedies like Midsummer Night's Dream fit into my second definition. None of his examples that I know fit my both of my definitions. I think that my definitions are better starting points for defining comedy. All comedies fit neatly into one definition or another and it excludes many other things that don't really seem like comedies. Grawe's definition is just too broad.
Who before coming into this class, would put Twelfth Night, Mr. Magoo, and Star Wars into the same genre? Not me. I would like to know how many genres Grawe thinks exists. Is it just one? It seems like it. For instance, I think that Star Wars fits into a drama genre far better than a comedy genre. Don't you agree? I mean unless you saw a parody, who came out of the theatre after watching Revenge of the Sith thinking, "Man that was hilarious! I laughed so hard I cried." Maybe a few people laughed at the bad acting in some of the Star Wars movies, but that was obviously not the intention. The books the movies are based upon, as well as the movie, is philosophically debated at many intellectual conferences (although to be fair some of these, although not all, are "just for fun"). Star Wars is dead serious, minus any actor's short comings in its representations. Grawe's definition seems fatally flawed this way.

Shakespeare and Slapstick

Shakespeare has a reputation for being difficult to read at first, and this is probably what comes to mind when we think of him. We know he wrote dramas, histories, tragedies, and comedies. As I will discuss in a later blog, what are deemed his comedies many not have struck us as all that hilarious the first time, especially when reading it, and this is where I want to draw a parallel.
Many teachers will tell you that "Shakespeare was meant to be seen and performed, rather than read in an academic setting". They will continue to tell you that without it being performed live something is missing. If you have ever seen a play, or multiple renditions of the same play, but read it first in an academic setting, you probably realize that (a) the play can be performed in many different ways according to interpretation and (b) it can be a lot funnier than you originally imagined while wading through Shakespeare's heavy dialogue in text format (heavy especially for modern readers who no longer use some of the same words and who no longer use some words or phrases the same way).
Slapstick may be similar in one way, namely that it seems to draw more laughs in its performed rather than textual format. This is probably not due to any jargon or heavy dialogue, although some of the works we have read are dated (much farther than Grawe allows comedy's theoretical shelf-life to be), but instead it is due to the format alone. We would have the same problems in Shakespeare even if he spoke in "plain English" instead of what some readers tend to assume is almost a different language (you have no idea how many times people tell me they cannot read Shakespeare's Middle English, an entirely different language, but not what he actually used which is the same English as ours). Slapstick works that we have read, for example much of Mark Twain's works, contain few words that we do not know, yet a number of us find slapstick much funnier in the visually performed format. Mark Twain himself performed his written works cross-country.
Why would he do this? Why wouldn't he just let people stay at home and read his works? The performance does something to increase the audience's enjoyment level. If you read a transcript of Chris Rock for example, and then saw him perform, which is funnier? You would probably laugh at the transcript, but would laugh harder at the actual performance. Now one could argue that some things were never meant to be read, but performed, and probably only the most visually imaginative people or actors could visualize the things that were meant to be performed. What about the things in both formats however? Can slapstick really be done on paper and have the same effect as a performance? Can slapstick be written solely for the textual medium and not the visual mediums as we know that many visual-medium-slapsticks are made solely for the visual medium ("to be performed, not read")?

Seriousness and Humor

Yesterday I bumped into an old teacher of mine who taught us Thomas Swift's Modest Proposal. Our conversation got me thinking about how I read the piece back then. It was mixed amid a curriculum of things like Inrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and The Illiad and The Oddesy. For some reason that semester we read all of those as well as Modest Proposal and we watched Mighty Python and the Holy Grail and listened to Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon while watching the Wizard of Oz. It was odd, yes. What was the theme? I don't know and neither does my old teacher. All I can remember is that the only things I ever found humorous in his class were his pathetic attempts to be humorous (which he knew were pathetic attempts--yes irony heaped on irony).
Why didn't I find Modest Proposal humorous however though? I started thinking about this. I was different back then, but I don't think that was the problem. I did realize that Modest Proposal was satire, so the reason I didn't find it humorous was not that I thought it was a real proposal. We started talking about the other teachers however and I realized what else I was studying at the time: World War II and the Holocaust.
What does this have to do with anything? Think. Humans really are capable of doing what Swift only jokes about. For instance, the Nazi's did make clothing accessories out of human skin. They also made things out of teeth. Without getting any more graphic, I will leave it by saying that generally they treated the Jews and other social outcasts like the American Indians treated buffalo. Yes, take a close look and there are even reports of cannibalism, although not widespread. The reality of something like this makes the humor melt away when the reality of it is in the forefront of our minds.
The problem with using humor for an argument is that there are some truly gruesome things that people try to combat with humor. Swift tries to combat poverty with his humorous argument. I think there is a problem with this however. It seems that when the serious problem (the real argument is being presented) either people will laugh it off or they will think so much about the serious issue that it ceases to be funny any longer.

"Mindless" comedy?

So it's a Friday night. You and all of your friends are going out. It's the weekend. You want to have some fun. The main idea is that the weekend is a time to get away from the everyday rigors of the real world, therefore what you do on the weekend must fit that principle. Really our American ideal of the weekend is very escapist. I'm sure we've all heard, "What do you want to do this weekend?" "Anything is fine except work." Most people adopt a slightly higher standard for their Friday nights. It's not just about anything besides work; it's about something fun; and by something fun most people seem to imply something not serious. I've heard some people say, "I want to watch something with no redeeming value what-so-ever" as a sort of ironic although truthful request for their Friday nights or any free time for that matter.
The funny-odd thing about this however is that when people think "not serious", "fun", "no redeeming value what-so-ever", many of them think about comedy. "Let's go see a comedy," I hear my friends say every Friday. No one wants to see that deep, next generation "A Beautiful Mind", or at least not every one. The funny-odd part about this however is that comedy does not always meet the above mentioned criteria, many times it doesn't. Many times there is a deeper social-political message to what we watch (or read for that matter). For instance, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is slapstick, but it is put in the background of a very grave and serious social-political problem. I think it has been mentioned in class also that Charlie Chaplain thought that this was a necessity; the comedy must be infused with a deeper more serious message to be its best.
A couple of works we have read have also been humor, but also quite serious: Thomas Swift's A Modest Proposal and The Nasby Papers on race. Swift just names off the most absurd things you could think of, like eating babies and maybe other low-lifes and making gloves out of their skin. Nasby makes his character-speaker sound like an idiot and that is funny. Each of them has a very serious topic and message however: the former about poverty and the latter about race relations. Why is it that people think humor can be made without a deeper message? Can it? Why does anyone expect it?

Is it really that funny?

Is it really that funny?

As a rule, I think that in order to be termed humorous, we have to laugh or snigger or make some kind of similar noise for the most part. It can differ in volume. The minimal amount of volume is that which can be heard by the laugher, a very low minimum indeed. I will even go so far as to say that possibly a smirk or a rolling of the eyes and an amused face will suffice (possibly without a noise). However when the “joke” results in this reaction without noise, the “joke” is passing from humorous to absolutely absurd, no longer in grips with reality to any extent, so disconnected as to not make sense in any far-fetched way.
Why do I state these things? Why do I think these are the bare minimum? Because some of the pieces that we are reading just aren’t humorous. They don’t meet these requirements. Many of them are overkill. The particular piece I want to talk about is Mrs. Hezekiah, the woman who cannot shut up or get to her point. This particular piece is of course a shaggy dog story. It goes no where logically. I don’t find it all that humorous. Actually I don’t find it funny at all. It’s kind of annoying.
This piece might actually be a case of “you had to be there”. It’s funny when you are there in person and an otherwise intelligent person rambles on and on and forgets her point. It’s about the delivery and reality. I feel like the Mrs. Hezekiah Bedott story is that same incident that we have all seen and heard only separated farther from the reader by the medium. The reality of it makes it funnier. However, by writing and not speaking this sort of joke, the reader feels separation. This woman is simply a woman who cannot get to the point. Whereas in real life, when someone does this it is usually funny for one reason with ancillary reasons: We know the person. Why does this matter? Have you heard the phrase “O there goes Sally again off talking about anything and everything”. This person is generally someone who is a little absent minded. Probably not the most intelligent person in your group. The funniness may have something to do with the superiority issues we have discussed in depth. And then in the other ancillary situation, an incredibly intelligent person goes off on a tangent because they are so passionate about something and then they miss the point they were trying to make. This I think is funnier. It is a momentary superiority in a way, I guess. These are the only situations I can see myself or my friends laughing at. The story of Bedott is just not funny on a few pages in a book.

Laughing at Ourselves

There are a few different rules of humor and I want to address one imparticular: the idea that the one being joked about has to be outside of the group. In one of the pieces we read, “The Sotweed Factor” this is certainly the case. Ebenezer Cook considers himself a Brit even if he does come to live in American for a time to gain his fortune (or at least attempt to). This is a little strange for reasons I will address later. Because he considers himself a Brit, he is therefore on the outside and America is “the other” being joked about.
Now the funny thing (not haha funny, but funny strange) is the way that Cook describes the Americans. The attributes that he ascribes to Americans, both directly and indirectly seem to imply him as an American in a few ways. He describes Americans as the antithesis of rudimentary people. They have adjusted to food and comforts subpar that of the Brits. He describes them as poor, outcasts who couldn’t make it big (and many times at all) in England, and so they have come here to try their luck. A modern day equivalent to England, at least business-wise, is New York. New Yorkers like to say, “If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere.” By this statement it also necessarily follows that if you can make it in another place you cannot necessarily make it in New York. It elevates New York above every other city. Cook himself however kind of fits into this category. If he could make it big in England, we get the impression he would have because of how much he likes England and detests Americans. Cook is trying to gain a fortune, which might lead us to believe that he is superior in some way. Another factor of funniness that we have discussed is superiority and inferiority. Cook does have some measure of superiority, even though he may or may not fit into his own general description of an American, thus making him fit into at least one “rule” or theory of humor. The reason why we might believe him to have some superiority is that he expects to be able to “make it big”, suggesting perhaps that he has made it on a smaller scale in England (although again, this is not necessarily true).
Now, even though Cook could be held to tentatively fit into the category of the British (although, yes this is suspect) or at least he thinks he is, he does qualify as “in the group”. However, the strange thing is this phenomenon called “laughing at ourselves”. When our class watched Eddie Izzard, we were laughing at ourselves. He makes fun of Americans numerous times (and I believe that his audience in the stand-up video is also American). He is making fun of his own audience, even though he is clearly outside of “the group”. I am proposing a possibility: Is it possible that since we are as Izzard calls us “Rome”, we are the hegemon, the empire, that we must (and willingly to some extent, although I think this has a lot to do with our free-speaking liberal with a little “l” culture) laugh at ourselves? Or is it merely our contradictory culture, a very Mills-ian one that not only allows, but promotes conflicting ideologies and philosophies in order that they combat and the best philosophy win and gain strength from the “fight”? Why do we laugh at Izzard?

You Kinda Had To Be There...A Frog Story

Three weeks into the semester, I think I can label myself as far as the comedy that I enjoy. I like witty worded and especially humorously performed pieces, mostly modern. The Word is King however. I love wordplay. I love the momentary flash of an ironic juxaposition or situation that can be commented upon, whether my own or someone else's. I love the dumb things that people do in the moment too, but those cannot be performed on stage. Those just happen. You have to be there. It's just one of those stories that you retell and it loses all of its life. Real life slapstick is the only kind for me, usually the unintentional kind and yes I laugh at myself often for this type of thing. It's those occassionally spacy, sometimes naive, or incredibly klutzy people that make the world laugh at their friends, or at least it's that way for me.
Sometimes I like to see just how naive people can be. It makes those tall tale stories even better. It is not usually the story itself that makes me laugh, but the naive listeners belief in its supposed truth. My thought process usually goes like this, "I don't want to smirk too much so that I give the joke away. O gosh I can't hold it in any more. I need to leave the room. I can't believe they believe this. I'm pretty naive, but not that much." In this way, the whole superiority thing does kick in a bit, but I feel I have paid my dues in this department. We all do. At some point each of us believes something outlandish and I have had my share.
The point I want to make however is that for some humorous works, you just need to be there. This is why I don't think that Mark Twain's Jumping Frog works. It is lifeless on a piece of paper (I have read it before too and had a similar reaction). Maybe I don't have a vivid picture mind from word to image, but it's just not that funny to me. If this happened to a friend of mine and he was actually relating it, it might be funnier. The funniest would be if I was the one leading the poor man on the wild goose chase and recieving the letter. I like to pull pranks and honestly, this one is more for the laughter of the pranker (and hopefully in some small way for the one being pranked if they are a good sport) than anyone else listening.

Modest Proposal

Swift's Modest Proposal lulls us into a sense of security of the truth and sincerity of the article if we aren't aware of what we are reading. The first time I read this piece, I was a sophomore in high school and while I realized how abhorrent eating babies was, on a logical level, a logos level, this argument makes perfect sense. I was very into the whole thinking logically not emotionally movement of sorts. This particular piece however emblazons upons one's mind forever how utterly unappealing and devoid of real power a completely logical, but emotionally devoid or abhorrent argument is.
My teacher back then, sophomore year in high school, did not warn us that this was a piece of satire, that Swift was not advocating eating babies as a response to overwhelming poverty, but rather was advocating the opposite, namely finding a good way to keep these children alive and thriving. Of course, an intelligent person deduces after that first fateful paragraph on the second full page (in our edition in Laughing Matters) where he suggests eating babies. I made a double take when I read this. First, I wanted to make sure I read it right. Second, I wanted to make sure he was not serious (because as we all know there are a lot of loons out there). Taking into account that this was Swift however, whom I knew to have written Gullivers Travels and did not have any mental illness or extreme radicalist ideas of such that I knew of, I deduced that no, he was not really suggesting eating babies.
What he was suggesting, as a subsidary to his main argument (a very serious argument about how poverty is treated) is that both pathos, ethos, and logos must be considered in an argument. An argument out of wack with one or two of these, as the baby eating argument is, is lacking an essential persuasiveness. It is comical even that someone would suggest something like this because it is so completely out of line with the standards of ethos and pathos, although, as I have mentioned, this particular argument is completely logical. The comicness of the article undercuts the prima facsia argument (i.e. eating babies) and adds to the power of the opposing argument. The things that we are told not to do, then in turn seem to be the best ones to do. This is the power that humor has in an argument.

Yo Mama and Aristotle

Although in my last blog I decided to write about an exception to what so many philosophers think is a rule about humor, I want to write today about that idea and its modern day truth. Even though there are exceptions, in modern day humor, the rule seems to not have changed much: Superiority of the laugher and joker in relation to the but of the joke remains a great part of humor.
I want to take a very modern popular example to prove my point. At times this show has been the most popular show on American television: American Idol. While this show is predominately not about humor (it is supposed to be about singing presumably), it does have its humorous moments (which is almost a rule today for any show, even for the most serious, dramatic shows).
Probably the funniest time is the tryouts; I think all of us viewers can agree. This is the time when we as viewers see the bad, the good and the ugly. The terrible singers, hopelessly disillusioned ones, incredibly poorly dressed ones, and the borderline mentally insane ones all come out for the initial trials, and this is about half of the show during the first weeks when the judges have not yet weeded out the bad and so-so and chosen the good. The reason why we watch these things is A) to see some talented singers and B) to see some really horrible ones and laugh.
Depending on what kind of viewer you are, one priority may come before the other. For example, a good friend of mine has explained to me a few times why she only likes watching the first few weeks: they are funny and after that the humor factor goes way down. What would your mother think?! What would Aristotle think?! You are making fun of people remember. You are assuming your superiority over another person and this superiority is not like some of the philosophers say, feigned, as it should be and as is acceptable. A feigned superiority is passing. We all do stupid things and we are all good humored and laugh at ourselves, but when it is not possible, when the true equality is garbled, it is not fair, and I think according to your mother and Aristotle, it is not for the greater good.
Here is a specific example on American Idol: a lady who tries out comes into the studio with papers on anatomy of singing and her own songs. From the way that she acts I think it is easy to notice two things: there is a very good chance that she is either mentally unsound or mentally challenged. The vast majority of us are not like her in these ways, and yet still many of us laugh.
Aristotle says that we must strive for a golden mean in all areas of life and humor is no different. By laughing at a woman like this I think we stray from that golden mean. It is not acceptable, even if the woman is on the TV and cannot see you or hear you, to laugh at something like that.

Superiority and Inferiority in Humor: What’s Superior about the Boo-berry Poptart Joke?

Most of the humor analysts that are commonly known for works about rhetoric claim that jokes are about the superiority of the teller or the laugher in contrast to the relative inferiority of the person the joke is on. These authors, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Freud to name a few, do try to define a difference between humor and other similar ideas like wit and comic-ness by various subtleties, however I think I have an example of funniness that does not fit any of these models. I believe that my example is also humorous, but you do not have to agree with that in order to ponder where a joke or funniness like this fits in.
So what is the joke? It is one that you hear probably every year at Halloween time if you open up your doors to the little people in costumes. It was funny the first time, but probably isn’t now. It is the Boo-berry Poptart Joke. The scene: A small child walks up to your door in a ghost costume, probably below the age of 8, because after that the joke is not as cute. The child says, “Trick or Treat! Do you want to hear a joke?” and you say, “Why yes, tell me your joke” in a humored manor. “What kind of Poptart do ghosts eat?” the small child asks. “I don’t know. What?” you might ask. “Boo-berry!” the child says gleefully.
Now one could argue that A) this joke is not funny at all. I concede that to a good deal of people, this is not funny or humorous or what-have-you. However, I know from personal experience that to some people it is incredibly humorous, mostly to old folks who love little kids and have never heard the joke before. After hearing it a thousand times I also concede that for most people, it is no longer funny. However this is true with all humorous things.
One could also argue that this has to do with delivery. The little child is cute and might say it in a humorous manner. I concede to that the humorousness has something to do with delivery, but I maintain that it is not the only thing that makes the joke humorous. This is the same with many humorous jokes. Unlike Freud who might say that we belittle the children by humoring them (instead of the other way around). In other words, we laugh at their jokes not because they are humorous to us, but because we are superior to them and will be nice enough to humor them. However, again, from my experience that is only part of the equation, and for some people, it is not even part of the equation. For example, my grandmother could not stop talking about how funny the joke was the first time she heard it, and no, she did not hear it from me. Her friends were the same way.
In conclusion, I believe that I have proven Aristotle, Hobbes, Freud and a number of influential rhetorical and analytical writers wrong in their assumption that humor necessarily. I am superior (whoops, did I say that?). Not all humor has to do with superiority and inferiority. What could possibly be inferior or superior about a boo-berry Poptart joke? Although much humor does deal with inferiority and superiority (namely when there is an object or but of the joke which of course is not present in the boo-berry joke), not all of it does.