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A Mini-Mystery In Humor
00:03:37
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| So an interesting question was asked recently on the message board, and that question was, what is comedy? | |
| What is comedy for? | |
| What is humor for? Why do we enjoy it? | |
| Why does it make us laugh? And I guess the why we enjoy it is because it makes us laugh. | |
| And I've puzzled this over over the years, and I've put together a few thoughts that I'm not going to claim are in any way inclusive. | |
| But I think are evocative and perhaps even provocative ways of looking at the question of humor. | |
| The one thing that seems to be true of humor is that it's like a mini-mystery. | |
| A joke is like a mini-mystery. | |
| And it's like a very, very short story with a twist, right? | |
| So, to take a classic joke... | |
| A man walks into a bar. | |
| Ooh! Right? | |
| This is a... | |
| A man walks into a bar and you expect it to be a drinking place, right? | |
| Like a tavern. | |
| But it's a bar as in a bar of metal or something like that. | |
| And so he goes, ooh! And so you're expecting it to be a long joke. | |
| And you're expecting... When it says a man walks into a bar, that's also a classic setup for a joke. | |
| Like, you know, three men walk into a bar and blah, blah, blah. | |
| And so you're expecting it to be a bar, and you're expecting it to be a longer joke, so you kind of mentally prepare yourself for one thing, and then there's a twist, and when somebody goes, uh, it's like, well, what's that? | |
| That's the end of the joke? Wait a second, what does that mean? | |
| Oh, a man walks into a metal bar, or something like that, right? | |
| And so there's a setup, there's an expectation, there's a twist, and one of the things that I think is definitely true of humor is that it... | |
| It incites you, in a way, to pay very close attention to language, to the manipulative powers and possibilities of language. | |
| I don't mean you would do this for any nefarious means, but I think it's important for alertness. | |
| So, something that my brother used to, sort of a quote joke my brother used to play on me was, what's one and one? | |
| And I would say two, and then he'd write one next to each other, and he'd say, no, it's eleven. | |
| And of course, if you would then say 11 the next time, he'd say, no, 2. | |
| You don't even know what 1 and 1 is. | |
| I mean, that's just a bit of a mind game or whatever, right? | |
| But what it does say is that it says, pay attention to the phrase and here, because it can be interpreted in two ways. | |
| The first way, of course, what is one and one is two, or the other one, what is one and one and eleven. | |
| Now, he doesn't say one plus one. | |
| If he said one plus one, it would be lamer to say eleven, but one and one could be interpreted to mean either eleven or to mean two. | |
| And so, it's a way of saying, pay attention to language. | |
| And that is, to me, a comedy It's all about alertness. | |
| It's about training your mind to look for nuance, to be alert to twists or to changes. | |
| It's a form of mental exercise in the same way that music is, and we can get into that perhaps another time. | |
| Another time. So, my experience of comedy was, and this is perhaps more of a British style of comedy, but it really was around Mental alertness and it also was around the breaking of convention. | |
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Mental Alertness Comedy
00:06:59
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| I mean, the war between habit and innovation in the mind is deep and powerful and fundamental to human progress, right? | |
| So, if you want to write a new or a novel kind of story, novel kind of story, great use of language stuff. | |
| If you want to write a new kind of story, it doesn't do much good to invent your own language, right? | |
| So, creativity Creativity is a real challenge because you have to use existing things to build something new when so much has already been built. | |
| As they say, there is nothing new under sun or moon. | |
| There is only a pendulum that swings back and forth for the most part. | |
| And so creativity is a genuine challenge. | |
| Even the Dada is Poets that I talked about in the Death of the West part 2. | |
| The Dada is Poets Did not invent a new language. | |
| They simply broke the conventions of the existing language. | |
| Or Gertrude Stein, who had on her notepaper, on her stationery, the phrase, a rose is a rose is a rose, was attempting to undo all of the florid language associated with the rose. | |
| Your lips are like a red, red rose. | |
| A rose is like a sinking sunset of swirly flowered ammonia. | |
| Making stuff up, right? But a rose had been so analogized and become itself such a metaphor within the English language that one of the attempts, conscious or not, of that group of writers, | |
| of which the most prominent was Ernest Hemingway, who went to go and visit Gertrude Strine and Alice Toklas, where they were living, I think in Paris, was to remuscularize the language, was to detach Simple objects from the increasingly florid language that surrounded them. | |
| And so, instead of saying, a rose is like a hamina hamina, her statement was, a rose is a rose is a rose. | |
| It's a rose! And you don't need to surround it with all this florid language to evoke the image in the mind. | |
| In fact, too much florid language destroys the rose and replaces it with nebulous puffs of poetic nonsense. | |
| And this is why a lot of the writers back then We're really into this fairly bald and muscular prose, where a language was stripped down to some pretty core essentials, and you can really see this in Hemingway's writing. | |
| And they stayed away from the poetic, which I thought was an interesting swing in language. | |
| Sorry, minor sidestep. | |
| So humor, to me, has always been about setting up expectations And then changing them. | |
| And that is something that... | |
| And also containing very compact levels of truth. | |
| Very, very compact levels of truth. | |
| So, you know, some of those, you know, sometimes fairly bigoted statements, you know, a Jew and a Black and an Oriental walk into a bar and then they go hamna, hamna, hamna. | |
| Now, those are, of course, about reinforcing stereotypes. | |
| And the truth that they contain is stereotypical and quite probably bigoted. | |
| But it does tell you a lot about a particular piece of information. | |
| Sorry, about a particular perspective that people have. | |
| And so that setting up of expectations, the need to pay attention to language. | |
| There is, in humor also, There can be, and I think quite often is, an element of aggression. | |
| It's like magicians can be that way as well, illusionists. | |
| I'm in control, and I'm going to outsmart you. | |
| A joke is all about outsmarting you. | |
| So a joke that is too obvious is not a joke. | |
| So if the joke had been, what's one and one, two, well that's not a joke, that's just a math question, right? | |
| But, sorry, what's one plus one with two? | |
| It's not a joke, right? | |
| What's one and one can go either way, and it's a form of manipulation and domination, because no matter what answer the person gives, you switch the answer, and then you're cleverer, and you've fooled them. | |
| And so there is an act of mental superiority in joke-telling. | |
| And this is why I've noticed, I don't think it's statistically provable or proven, but I've noticed that insecure people will often go into comedy as a form of Of domination, right? | |
| Of being smarter. Of being smarter. | |
| Comedy also does a great job of puncturing pretension. | |
| As Gertrude Stein's, hey, it does fit, a rose is a rose is a road, punctures the pretension of the romantic poetry around a flower, a rose. | |
| And so there was a comedian I saw once who had the sort of following routine about guys who were interested in strapping themselves to trees during a Florida hurricane because they wanted to experience extreme elements and so on. | |
| And he was, of course, drinking and smoking throughout this routine. | |
| And he was saying, well, these guys are idiots, right? | |
| These guys who are strapping themselves to trees during a hurricane. | |
| He says, you know, because they say, well, I'm an Iron Man. | |
| I'm fit. And he says, well, it's not so much that the wind is blowing. | |
| It's what the wind is blowing. | |
| If you get hit in the chest with a Volvo, it doesn't really matter how many sit-ups you did yesterday, now does it? | |
| Which I thought was actually a very funny routine. | |
| And it punctures the vanity. | |
| And there's a lot of... | |
| Propaganda in comedy. | |
| And so this guy, who's drinking and smoking, is saying that extreme fitness buffs are ridiculous. | |
| And he's, of course, taking that. | |
| And you see this all the time in movies, where the cool person is just right. | |
| You see this all the time in medical dramas, right? | |
| Where there's the trembling-lipped young intern or first-year resident, and then there's the grizzled old Aggressive surgeon, and they have to sort of go up and beg and plead and want attention. | |
| This was the whole first couple of seasons of Grey's Anatomy, where you get this hierarchy that's just set up. | |
| And comedy, particularly stand-up comedy, is very often an argument for a particular hierarchy. | |
| Like, extreme fitness buffs are ridiculous. | |
| Relax, have a drink, and a smoke. | |
| And let's laugh at these idiots. | |
| Who are getting up and strapping themselves to trees and doing extreme fitness things and are so deranged that they think that sit-ups will somehow protect them from a car that is flying through the air. | |
| Again, that's a form of aggression and superiority and a mocking of this kind of perspective. | |