#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.

#8 "Our Theories of Comedy" -- Don

If I were you, Dear Reader, I’d have a clothespin nearby to stick on my nose expecting this post to go very sour very quickly (and I think I just heard a collective “What’s a clothespin?” reverberate from the psyches of all the younger readers who are Olivia’s age). 

This post is most likely going to stink up the entire Internet; after reading this, you’ll try to head on over to PostSecret or Metafilter, and the odor will continue to seep through the olfactory sensors of your computer’s motherboard – making it impossible for you to stay on the web until the stench has passed.  And that might take days or weeks.  Let’s face it; a hillbilly with a PhD in English explaining what makes something funny has FAIL stenciled on it in bright red letters.  Don’t be surprised if while you’re reading this a HAZMAT team in orange spacesuits suddenly breaks into the room and confiscates your computer.

Aristotle, as far as we know (and by “we,” I mean myself and the imaginary academic types who live in my head wearing tweed jackets while sporting leather patches at their elbows), was the first person to systematically lay out the generic aspects of tragedy and comedy.  Although in the work that in English is known today as Poetics, Aristotle’s Theories of Tragedy have survived 2.5 millennia, what he wrote about Comedy has long been lost to the ages.  That’s probably not a bad thing.  I imagine that if extant copies of Aristotle’s theories of Comedy had survived, the influence they may have had on Western Civilization could have ruined what’s actually funny for the rest of us.  Had Aristotle’s Theory of Comedy survived, the capacity to recognize what’s funny would have ended up on standardized tests, and I have visions of an alternative reality where students are routinely diagnosed as “humorously impaired” and are forced into taking “remedial funny” classes where they would spend joyless hours filling out worksheets on knock-knock jokes.

In that brief slice of my life between being a full-time college student and a full-time schoolteacher, I actually made a little money performing as a standup comedian.  Now this was back in the early ‘80s before very many comedy clubs began springing up in most major cities so (as far as I knew back then) there weren’t many venues for people to be paid for being funny.  Looking back on it now, I consider it a blessing that it never crossed my mind to pursue standup comedy as a career (for what its worth, it probably never crossed any of my audience’s mind that I’d consider such a career either).

However, from that brief stint telling jokes to strangers, I can tell you that I do know two things about comedy: 1) some things are never funny, and 2) there is nothing that is always funny. 

First, there are some topics that are not funny and any attempt to make them funny will only serve to identify the person who makes the attempt appear to the rest of us as a first-class douchebag (for anyone who may be unfamiliar with this curious term, it’s a French expression that can only be roughly translated into English as “every personally trait that Glenn Beck and Kanye West share in common.”)  As tempted as I may be to make a list of The Things That are Never Funny, I won’t.  Everyone, I believe, needs to grow up and at some point in their lives come to the realization that making jokes that rob others (either individually or as a group) of their humanity pushes all of civilization back in the wrong direction. 

{Well, I imagine I hear some reader thinking, isn’t that just what you just did with your reference to Glenn Beck and Kanye West?  And my answer to that is “No, heck no. “ It’s impossible to rob someone of their humanity when they’ve already traded it in for as much money and celebrity as they can possibly get by exploiting the legions of stupid people who are apparently willing to support them.}

In regards to theorem #2, that nothing is always funny, I’ll never forget from my experience of doing standup (and from watching the same comedians who would either go on before or after me) how some comedic bits could be uproariously hilarious one night and not even generate a snicker of laughter the next night.  Although there’s nothing that can compare to the flop sweat that gets generated when – in the middle of a set – an audience has given up on finding anything humorous at all in what you’re saying, I’m still very content not to know why a joke can make a crowd guffaw one night and miss it entirely the next. 

It’s the mystery that keeps us telling jokes.  In order to find out the answer as to why something can be utterly hilarious in one context and completely humorless in another, it would require scientific investigation, and that, as I mentioned above, could lead to an official explanation that ultimately would lead to “walks in a bar” jokes showing up on the ACT and SAT exams, and some bureaucrat working for the Department of Education deciding upon not only which calculators are approved for use on the math section, but which rubber chickens could be used for the “you need to be funny” part.

Why did the dying chicken cross the road?  If you already know the answer, give yourself a +5.  If you think you can explain why that’s funny, you’ll need to go ahead and subtract 2.  If you have no idea what the answer is, go across the hall and take a seat; you’re remedial humor teacher will be right in with a worksheet and a pair of Groucho Marx glasses.


Olivia says: 


I think it's weird that not everybody appreciates humor.  


I agree only somewhat that somethings will never be funny.  Unfortunately, sometimes, and I really do hate to admit it, but douchebags can be funny.  But what makes them douchebags is that they made the joke in the first place.  


There are so many funny things out there.  The world is chock full of 'em.    


So picking hurtful jokes is like eating only bananas.  


Eventually, it will kill you.  Or at the very least, say something about you that you probably would rather avoid. 


In fact, much douchebaggery could probably be avoided if there were humor classes.   It would be cool if there were comedy classes at highs chools  - maybe as electives?  


Except I can only imagine Ben Stein teaching the humor class.  


PS. I wonder how knock-knock jokes were born.