#8 Our Theories of Comedy - Olivia

This is how I imagine the birth of humor:

A tribe of eight cave people are gathered around a crude fire.  It is cold where they are and the yield from hunting is meager at best.  The mood is palpably tense due to the stress of survival in this climate.  Each caveman is caught in primitive preoccupation.  No one particularly notices the eldest tribesman slowly rise from his rock and turn himself to warm his back side.  As he bends slightly to rekindle feeling in his hindquarters, he suddenly starts sniffing.  

After three quick inhales, the caveman let's out an exasperated, "AGAAAHHH" and sneezes enough to propel himself a step forward.  Simultaneously, triggered by the sneeze spam and still bent over, the old caveman rips a fart so expressive that it catches ever so briefly with the fire.  The unexpected flash casts a new light on the cave community, highlighting their features comically, casting an exaggerated shadow here, a strange expression there.  The fart echoes over and over again throughout their deep cave.  

From wide-eyed caveman to caveman, there was no recovery from that moment.  That moment rattled their souls loose. 

It was the fart heard round the world, historically speaking.

I can't say how we developed the rest of our finer instincts.  Like deciding to stop eating things just because they nourished us, but because they tasted good.  Or when we decided to switch clothes right before we went to sleep.  But I would put money on the idea that humor developed from laughing at farts.  I'm pretty sure it's funny in every culture.

As a kid, I always looked to my dad as a humor indicator.

I could hear him laughing at late night TV from my room while I lay in my little bed.  It would kill me not to know what was so very funny.  I would try to make up scenarios, but I knew I was only kidding myself.

 It was almost worse watching something with him.  Some things would make him laugh huge room-filling laughs and I just wouldn't get it.  So I would just make a guess.

Now, I find everything funny.

I am one of those people who laugh until they cry.  I laugh to the point of completely emptying my lungs and still eek out breathy chuckles when there is nothing left.  I'm one of those who audibly sigh a "Woo" or a "Shoot" when it's all said and done.

And of course, after I had figured out how great laughing was, shortly after birth, I knew I needed to make other people laugh.

As a kid, I tested many a formula for my jokes.  Luckily, my parents accommodated me with a younger sister to act as a sounding board for my experiments in humor.  This was fantastic until I realized she was giggling when I asked her to pass the orange juice.

Accents were hilarious, I was sure of that.  Accents became joke insurance for me.  My favorite accent was the one being spoken by my mom and her family who live in the greater Cleveland area of Brunswick.  It never occurred to me that I could be making fun of anyone.  But I realized that my jokes that killed everywhere else did not raise an eyebrow when visiting my grandparents.

Catch phrases were investment jokes.  And risky.  Something could be funny one day and suddenly overwhelmingly offensive the next.  Or worse, lame.  Wakka wakka wakka.

However, "Check yourself - before you wreck yourself," will never, ever, stop being funny to me.

The road to the El Dorado of jokes will always be an unexpected one.  But after living roughly 21 years, I finally heard the funniest joke of them all only two months ago.

And if the moon is full and the timing right, maybe someday,  I'll tell it to you.

Until then, you'll have to wait for the Whale joke.

Or don't think about it.  If you build it up, it's not funny anymore.

Don replies:


Your theory of "The Farting Caveman" is probably correct; now that it's on the internet, it's just a matter of time before some academician gets a federal grant to study the ramifications of "Farting Caveman Theory" (which will henceforth be referred to as FCT) on Western Civilization.


I'll get that person started by suggesting that soon after farting at the fire grew popular, that the genre of "Literary Criticism" was born.  "Yes, yes," some other caveman wrote on a cave wall in style that looks like stick figures to us today, "There's no doubt that Ogg is the master of duration and odor when farting at the fire, but really, what does he bring new to the art?  It's all been done before."


And eventually, someone accidently set his animal skin on fire and created dancing.  Subsequently, it probably took humans centuries to realize they could dance around a fire without actually igniting themselves first.  And then, the dancing led to the creation of the first religion, when someone stood up and declared, "The local invisible people want you folks to stop farting at the fire, igniting yourselves, and jumping around rhythmically afterwards because having too much fun offends them to the core."  Wow, I know so much about FCT already I should go ahead and apply for the Federal Grant myself, after all I seem to have all the qualifications: a PhD and no clue as to how advancing this theory would actually benefit anybody.