Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!cca!ima!ism780!chris 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 Lines: 54 #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