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From: chris@ism780.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.jokes.d
Subject: Re: Re: Re: 'Offensive' jokes, minoritie - (nf)
Message-ID: <233@ism780.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 13-Jun-84 00:10:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: ism780.233
Posted: Wed Jun 13 00:10:41 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 14-Jun-84 06:48:08 EDT
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#R:sun:-122900:ism780:12400002:000:2756
ism780!chris    Jun 10 20:04:00 1984

< No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! >


Theories about humor always scare me.  (This may be an artifact 
of my engineers training, theories always scare me.  :-) ) I've 
seen a couple different theories about humor, and it seems that 
the better the theory, the less funny it is.  Yet i observe that 
by and large, a good sense of humor is an active aid in day to 
day life.  This suggests to me that theories of humor may be 
missing the point.  I notice that very few people actually laugh 
when something terrible happens.  But people break up 
uproariously when something that might have been terrible turns 
out ok but undignified (The rocket train sequence in "The Great 
Race" comes to mind).  If the rocket train had crashed into a 
mountain, splattering Prof Fate and his henchman into red mush, 
no one would have laughed.  When they end up in the pig wallow, 
and Prof Fate says: "That's another one the Great Leslie should 
try on for size!", the audience busts a gut.  

It seems to me that laughter is an attempt to deal with the essentially
overwhelming nature of the universe. Humans are small and weak compared
to the world, and our lives are often short and sad. If you think about
this a lot, you can get depressed. (net.suicide, we got another emergency)
But, somehow, a good laugh seems to put everything back into perspective.
Some small part of the universal absurdity catches my fancy, and i start
snickering. Before long whoops of laughter are roaring out and i am holding
my sides with tears rolling down my face. It isn't everything that catches
me as being this funny (sheep jokes in fact are so flat you could skate
on them) but just often enough something truly comical happens and
suddenly the tension and depression drop away.

I offer an example of humor that is not latent sadism.  Every 
once in awhile, i will see someone doing truly inspired stand up 
comedy.  This will often not be a professional comedian, but just 
someone who is doing schtick.  If they are truly wired into the 
moment, the audience is not laughing at the comedian, and they 
are not laughing at the "jokes", they are laughing with the 
comedian, as (s)he shows us how the world looks to them.  For 
three or four glorius moments, we see how truly strange and 
wonderful the world is looking at it from the right point of 
view.  I can think of an available example of this.  The "Ice Box 
Man" routine by George Carlin is hysterically funny.  For several 
minutes he goes on about the various strange things associated 
with owning a refrigerator.  This routine is not based on 
sadism.  It just shows the familiar world from a 27 and 1/2
(or so) degree slant.


		Chris Kostanick
		decvax!vortex!ism780!chris
		decvax!cca!ima!ism780!chris