What's So Funny?

Humor is the result of something happening to you or someone else who is taking a moral high ground as though it were a military objective in a John Wayne movie. Humor is the product of you or someone consciously or unconsciously attempting a promotion in status or importance. Humor is someone's ox being gored, a literal or figurative slip, a gift from some high-flying bird that immediately reduces status and stature. Humor is the result of two persons thinking they've reached an agreement only to discover later on that they were agreeing to two different things.

Humor is literally and figuratively being thrown from a high horse; it is the deflation of pomposity, the lowering of status, the fall from grace of an individual or organization attempting to maintain dignity by overreach. Splendid targets for humor are moral superiority, exaggerated virtue or wisdom, pretentiousness.

In other words, humor always has a victim. Without a victim there can be no humor, thus the notion that humor, of all the literary and rhetorical devices, is the heat-seeking missile that can bring down pretentiousness and absurdity with the most immediate effect. We enjoy being laughed with, which is to say, we enjoy sharing a joke; we do not, however, enjoy being laughed at, for this is a sign that we are not what we pretended to be.

Humor is dramatic by nature, which is to say it comes as the result of interactions between individuals and organizations; involves persons doing things or not doing other things; it is the result of situation, dramatic reversal, possibly even surprise. If it is a well-placed barb or rejoinder, a clever pun or play on words, sorry; it doesn't make the grade as humor even though it may produce one or both responses associated with humor, the laugh or the groan. Such events are wit and perhaps even witty; as Mark Twain said of the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, there is a world of difference.

Humor is often found sharing the same living quarters with tragedy or some form of pathos. In a memorable Charlie Chaplin film, Chaplin, as the Tramp, becomes helplessly and hopelessly in love with a blind girl at a flower stand, often pausing in his daily routine to stare wistfully at her as she arranges flowers, sets up vases and plants, goes about her work of tending her stall. One day as he watches the girl, he gets too close and she, unaware of his presence, throws out a vase of water--right in his face.

Although you will hear different opinions about its appropriateness, humor may appear anywhere because it is volatile and because it is a constant reminder that the more serious we become, the more likely we are to provoke some element, perhaps several elements of humor.

The three things we are enjoined from injecting humor into are sex, religion, and politics. It is easy to see why this injunction is sometimes broadcast; with the possible exception of death and funerary matters, there are few things funnier than sex, religion, and politics, either our own or someone else's.

Where to look for humor? Everywhere. Start with groups of individuals involved in institutions: families, schools, churches, clubs, professions. Think of it this way, Humor is the street people of society, reminding us in sharp, memorable jabs that our best intentions and best laws and best inventions and compositions are all vulnerable. Humor looms like Magwich in the graveyard scene in Great Expectations, the unthinkable come to pass, the unthinkable come to laugh at us and our serious.

That's not funny, they will tell you, as though that could stop anything.

Entre'acte

1. One of the reasons you've made the protagonist of a project in the works, a short-ish novel called Exit, Pursued by a Bear, a specialist in Nineteenth-Century literature is because the dialectic between duty and individual passion is so striking.

2. Neither of these two things (the business about the tidal opposites in the Nineteenth Century, or your considered awareness of this fact) occurred to you before the fact, only after you'd reviewed written pages to see where things were going, then was hit by the implications

3. What the Lit major forgets is often as important as what the Lit major remembers.

4. In a letter he wrote to Anne Sexton on August 9, 1967, Ted Hughes said, "[Y]ou've no need to worry. When you've got it you've got it--you don't have to worry about poetry, you just have to be truthful (which is where the brain and all its hideous lies leap in, I know.")

5. A lovely argument for not thinking, complete with possible idiosyncratic side effects, as in How does one keep on course of being truthful?

6. Answer: Write quickly, revising only locution, not emotion nor event, and especially not outcome.

7. Reviewing Bernhard Schlink's newly published Homecoming, by all accounts an emotional and intellectual joy, produced echoes of 1, 2, 3 supra in the sense that one of the major themes of the novel was The Odyssey as quintessential homecoming archetype, leading you to remind the reader that Odysseus' name may without any great leap be translated to mean "a man of many turns" which indeed he was, employing sophistication and sophistry. After sending in the review, you wondered why you mentioned this, then remembered a series of stories you wrote about an actor name of Matthew Bender, who is returning home after having performed on stage in New York in a successful play with a backstory of contentiousness. And you were thinking Bender=man of many turns=bingo; you were thinking homecoming without even thinking homecoming.

8. This week the subject for review is by design and now of a two-year tradition a previously published book. Machado de Asisi, the author of this week's book died in 1908, two years after Leopold Bloom made his famous tour through Dublin. Epitaph of a Small Winner, a novel I first read over forty years ago, is a series of short chapters, sometimes as short as a paragraph, rarely over three or four pages. The chapter numbers appear flush on the left margin of the page, just as the numbers of this list and how many dozes of lists on these blog pages appear. Did this wild, Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy romp of a novel have any effect, affect, and influence on me? Dare to question your inner Lit major.

9. Will tomorrow's installment of Bear explicate a homecoming? Rely on it.

10. Does knowing outcomes in advance undercut their meaning?

11. Only if it forecloses further discovery.

12. So it's all about discovery? Could James Carvavelle have tagged this on the writer's wall?