The Tyranny of Humour

I was in a class with some of those young people yesterday and they were discussing the appropriate writing style for a blog they'd been assigned to produced. And they all agreed that what was more important than pretty much anything was to keep your tone light and humorous. And I started thinking about this, probably cos I was in a gloomy and contrary frame of mind.

And then yesterday on the comedy film nomination thread, somebody said this

i've thought about this now and again and decided that i've probably never loved a movie or book or whatever that didn't make me laugh at least some of the time. you can do comedy that's devoid of other modes of expression/entertainment but it's hard to do anything truly compelling that's totally devoid of humor

and i thought some more.

I feel as though those are two widely accepted social truths, and I wonder if this feeling - that a sense of humour is near-vital to artistic communication - is an expression of our age or of western culture or of human thought in general? I feel as tho it isn't, as if this is quite modern, this insistence on humour above all else. Well not above but at the heart of all else perhaps.

This is a dense knot in my head that I'm trying to delineate rather than fully untangle here. So this thread might fly or die accordingly. But some questions

Are we socially more obsessed with humour now than our ancestors might've been? Why? Is humour always an important or useful thing? Are there other emotional modes that deserve to be foregrounded by the culture? Is everybody somehow a David Brent at heart now?

And so on.

humor is, maybe, the most important way we connect with other people?

like maybe nothing will catapult you faster into the front of the group of people whom dayo esteems than by me discovering you laugh at the same things that I do, and more importantly, for the same reasons

well that's a big question i think. humour seems to have a self-protective function as much as a reaching out function, and of course there's whole sections of humour designed to hurt or belittle. but now more than ever i feel like "being funny" is in some way at the heart of social discourse.

we communicate more, with more people, more freely, with less at stake? Allows for levity/risk (significant ingredients for humour) to an extent that may not have been likely/possible when communication was expensive/arduous.

and yeah it can be bonding but the most important means? or the safest means? i dunno i can't conceive that that's always and everywhere true.

allied to yer more leisure time/demand for entertainment

Just thinkin out loud by text here

More leisure time? Not in the work-till-you-drop UK!

i feel like i work with and meet a lot of people for whom "being funny" is more important to them than the sense of what they're trying to communicate. i feel like i have been that kind of person, often.

this thread is for thinking out loud, obv

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

Tend to associate this with 'comedy' as a present cultural thing.

But, thinking further, I'm really not sure about that 'now'. English (in particular) notoriously obsessed/associated with mocking, belittling, cynical humour. (Can't speak for the distinction of this from other nations really, but I have a vague sense of having gained this impression from a reasonably wide range of historical reading).

Can't carry on thinking this through here now, 'cos I got work to do, but I think it's a thing - just where that 'thing' is located in time and national space, and if or how it's changed are thorny matters.

It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

This is horrible.

Of course humour is a very important bonding tool, but it has penetrated into areas where, y'know, I don't want to bond. I can do without bonding with my fruit smoothie, for instance. I can do without bonding with sheets of paper that are giving me instructions. I would really rather not bond with these things, and I find it incredibly rude and presumptuous that they seem to think it's okay.

I feel as though those are two widely accepted social truths, and I wonder if this feeling - that a sense of humour is near-vital to artistic communication - is an expression of our age or of western culture or of human thought in general?

http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/102970000/102977274.jpg

oh emily that is another thing yes, humour infecting even the dryest of informational material.

xp to nv

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

I know that's what you're asking tho (lol beg the question)

Thought this was going to be about the tyranny of the excelsior thread.

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

Not as long as they're funny with it

'incredibly rude and presumptuous' seems a v strong reaction tho.

i dunno that i'm asking completely that, but the terms we think about it are telling i think. like surely you cd be pretty earnest most of the time without being a huge pill. and of course the qualities i'm looking for in friends aren't necessarily the same qualities i'd want from a co-worker or a writer or an MP or my doctor

The funniest people I know are all serious

'incredibly rude and presumptuous' seems a v strong reaction tho.

Really? To be honest I thought I was being quite restrained. I find false attempts at closeness by marketing types to be personally violating and demeaning to all of my real relationships. I hate hate hate hate it.

Also, sincerity is totally not at the bottom of my list of positives. Earnestness has a slightly different connotation, though.

Yeah, what's wrong with sincerity anyway?

i think i might be looking for the same qualities in all those ppl, though, again the element of risk/trust that seems to me to be implicit in reaching out through humour is important. aching sincerity is great in its place but doesn't invite me to participate, i dunno.

heh i guess i'm more than usually averse to sincerity nm it's not ye it's me

The funniest people I know are all serious

― Charles Kennedy Jumped Up, He Called 'Oh No'. (Tom D.), Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:26 AM (4 minutes ago)

It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

This is horrible.

The sentiment or the phrasing, Tom?!

Earnestness is difficult, because it often seems to preclude humour, which in itself precludes something leavens conversation.

Sincerity, yeah, nothing wrong with that. To follow up my 'niceness' comment, that low-level pretty unfunny conversational humour often seems to undermine sincerity, it's a block on discussing things seriously, and seems to be an expression of an uncertainty that doesn't want to admit itself.

Whereas good humour will often illuminate sincerity, and be a consequence of it.

Even Shakespearean tragedy uses humour as a release valve and/or commentary. Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

The alternative is looking po-faced, and no one wants that when they're trying to make a serious point.

FUCK COMEDY

FUCK "LIGHT" AND "HUMOROUS"

a bit flailing around rn but THIS IS A SUBJECT OF INTEREST TO ME because i want to ERADICATE IT

:)

^^^ Fronting.

The sentiment or the phrasing, Tom?!

Sentiment!

Lex virtually every r&b or rap quote you have ever posted has been humorous in some way. "Humour" =/= comedy.

Jesus imagine how terrible rap music would be if you eradicated all the humour.

This is something I struggle with so much.

It's that kind of British kneejerk thing of snark or "comedy" as a way of saying "yes, look, I'm being self referential and reflective about this" when actually it's almost the opposite of being properly reflective and becomes reflexive rather than reflective.

I don't see the problem with taking things seriously. The problem is that "humour" as become a kind of shortcut for "self aware" and yes, I think that self awareness is hugely important to make great art, but it's like humour is the easiest, cheapest and lowest form of self awareness.

The problem is that "humour" as become a kind of shortcut for "self aware"

News to me

humor is, maybe, the most important way we connect with other people?

like maybe nothing will catapult you faster into the front of the group of people whom dayo esteems than by me discovering you laugh at the same things that I do, and more importantly, for the same reasons

― flagp∞st (dayo), Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:12 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is very much true for me. I just feel like people who have a similar sense of humor to me just sort of get me better than those who do not. Someone can be perfectly pleasant and engaging but if we don't laugh at the same things I sort of know we're never going to be great friends.

I don't see a problem with taking things seriously either but think you can value both seriousness and comedy highly. Also agree with the thing about the funniest people I know being quite serious.

if we don't laugh at the same things

Obviously I don't mean all the same things all the time but just in a general sort of way.

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

Pretty otm. People seem to be terrified of sincerity anymore, and almost every cultural utterance seems tainted with an ironic smirk. But it's so often forced and unnatural and used as a distancing mechanism that I find it generally off-putting. As a society, we know how to follow the formula of a joke but we don't know how to replicate the soul of it.

This is kind of a formless idea, but it can be instructive to look at the television commercials that come out of a particular era in trying to get a sense of that era. '80s commercials seem so earnest about wanting to sell the good people a product, whereas today they're jokey and barely about what's being sold and, more often than not, fairly inhumane. To the extent that we accept that marketers have their finger on the pulse of society, it seems like a fair metric by which to measure how we interact as a society.

This is a big, big topic that I have lots of thoughts about. Let me get them properly in order.

"Humour" as a shorthand for "self aware" = "oh look, we are laughing at ourselves by laughing at our subject matter, we are aware that taking things seriously is kind of uncool, therefore we are using this kneejerk humour to distance ourselves from it, and show that we are in on the joke and also self aware."

This thread is clearly going to delineate along the usual lines of those for whom humour shows some kind of camaraderie and those for whom it's a slightly presumptuous assumption of intimacy. I'm not going to draw any cultural conclusions, but I tend towards the latter. But I'm also one of those po-faced fules who values sincerity.

People seem to be terrified of sincerity anymore, and almost every cultural utterance seems tainted with an ironic smirk

this seems a little overstated. there's plenty of sincerity to be found all around you. maybe not on the L train but

Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

First thoughts are Greek tragedy (they're presented next door to satyr plays, iirc? but the things themselves are dead serious), Paradise Lost, the works of William Wordsworth. maybe even some shakespeare… there's not much fun in Coriolanus or Timon is there? (I may be forgetting the light relief scenes)

Very big generalised rough idea would that you need quite a serious belief system, and a belief in some ultimate high seriousness that can be found in art – I think that's there in Romanticism & its descendants through high modernism (in Europe, horrors of 1st half of the century have a part to play in earnest art too); it's not there so much now - we tend to be suspicious of things that claim high purpose and have no time for entertainment.

& then there's a secondary british argument about puritan or non-conformist tradition, maybe, that creates an art with less time for joking (is the Pilgrim's Progress funny? I remember it being really, really not).

I'm prone to liking stuff with jokes (or facing terrible universe with bitter stoic laughter etc), but unseriousness can be a real irritant – feel like Beckett is often pushed, nervously, as 'actually very funny', which is true, sure, but dodging some of the heart of it.

it's pretty hard to be sincere without being funny

guess it could almost be reduced, even for argument's sake, to two outlooks- 'the world is a serious place, in spite of it all' vs 'the world is a humorous place, in spite of it all'.

When I'm writing something it comes naturally to me to insert maybe a little bit of humour. But often I read back something after it's published and just think "what was I doing?!". Humour is an effective tool but a dark art. One shouldn't wield it unless one knows what they're doing.

irony is pretty much our primary tool as a feeling species and eventually when all of us who grew up in the 1990s are finally dead people will remember that the word doesn't mean "making fun of stuff" but refers to an attunement to the failure of expectations that is at root deeply humble, and that since probability and not physics is on some level the mother of the sciences lacking or failing to develop this sense is like never understanding that objects move when you push them, i.e., you won't ever have any idea what's going on

Learning to be funny is a hard path for the uncool adolescent to take, but it bears rich fruit.

So by the time you get to college if you have figured out how to make people laugh turning it off is going to seem dangerous.

IMO.

Also had a prof who apparently didn't understand sarcasm, pretty weird to not be able to reliably use that register with someone. He just gets concerned when people are sarcastic at him.

Humour as a shorthand for self-awareness usually smacks of insecurity and defensiveness to me. That said, when you see things (especially in the corporate world) that are really po-faced and serious or just idiotic and unaware how ridiculous they are it can be pretty fucking funny.

Point is humor is just a decent way of building up a wall around yourself and your feelings. It's also a good way of taking that wall back down. Regarding yourself with complete seriousness is as broken as being a joke-telling ironic reactive cipher.

Well, a knee-jerk response I often have in my head is that people are frightened of seriousness 'now', and use a continual low-level humour, or non-directional irony in their writing and speech out of fear of assertion and subsequent contradiction, and therefore argument and thought. It's almost become an adjunct of 'niceness'.

yeah, this rings true for me, too. a sense of humor is obviously very important, and i agree that there's humor of some sort or another in almost all great film & literature, but "intelligent" internet culture does seem to have cultivated a kind of hostility to sincerity. more often than not, this seems defensive, the avoidance of risk by keeping it light.

personally, i strongly disagree that earnestness and sincerity are close to the bottom on the list of qualities i value in others. quite the opposite, tbh. i like people who are willing to honestly speak their minds and engage directly with ideas. people who can and will do this, who are smart, open-minded and humble about it, are quite rare, i find. absent humor, that sort of earnest exposition can become quite dull, but humor without something substantial to say quickly becomes horribly grating.

I often tone down the humour in my music writing but feel like there's a definite need retain an element. Anything likely to be read by an audience of people who are passionate about the subject can be as serious as you like, anything that's going to attract a large number of people who don't really care and are just reading to pass the time, and possibly learn something, has a lot more pressure to be 'engaging'. The most direct way of doing that is through a light tone with a bit of humour.

I try to do the same thing when i'm writing in my day job - anything that can make someone smile is probably going to have a much better chance of sticking in the memory. A lot of marketing copy-writers seem to be really bad at it though.

i've linked to this before, but this is one of my favorite essays about anything, ever:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm

Try, for a moment, to become interested in everything that is being said and done; act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion: as though at the touch of a fairy wand you will see the flimsiest of objects assume importance, and a gloomy hue spread over everything. Now step aside, look upon life as a disinterested spectator: many a drama will turn into a comedy. It is enough for us to stop our ears to the sound of music, in a room where dancing is going on, for the dancers at once to appear ridiculous. How many human actions would stand a similar test? Should we not see many of them suddenly pass from grave to gay, on isolating them from the accompanying music of sentiment? To produce the whole of its effect, then, the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.

...

This intelligence, however, must always remain in touch with other intelligences. And here is the third fact to which attention should be drawn. You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others. Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group. It may, perchance, have happened to you, when seated in a railway carriage or at table d'hote, to hear travellers relating to one another stories which must have been comic to them, for they laughed heartily. Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so. A man who was once asked why he did not weep at a sermon, when everybody else was shedding tears, replied: "I don't belong to the parish!" What that man thought of tears would be still more true of laughter. However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary. How often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience! On the other hand, how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group! It is through not understanding the importance of this double fact that the comic has been looked upon as a mere curiosity in which the mind finds amusement, and laughter itself as a strange, isolated phenomenon, without any bearing on the rest of human activity. Hence those definitions which tend to make the comic into an abstract relation between ideas: "an intellectual contrast," "a palpable absurdity," etc.,—definitions which, even were they really suitable to every form of the comic, would not in the least explain why the comic makes us laugh. How, indeed, should it come about that this particular logical relation, as soon as it is perceived, contracts, expands and shakes our limbs, whilst all other relations leave the body unaffected? It is not from this point of view that we shall approach the problem. To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.

i don't know how anyone can survive in this world without recognizing the inherent ridiculousness of human existence

personally, i strongly disagree that earnestness and sincerity are close to the bottom on the list of qualities i value in others

Did anyone actually say that this is true for them?

This thread is clearly going to delineate along the usual lines of those for whom humour shows some kind of camaraderie and those for whom it's a slightly presumptuous assumption of intimacy. I'm not going to draw any cultural conclusions, but I tend towards the latter. But I'm also one of those po-faced fules who values sincerity.

This is nonsense though. Sincerity vs humour is a false dichotomy. The idea that ideas of humour split along those lines is another one. You yourself clearly don't view it as a presumptions assumption of intimacy because you use humour around people you don't particularly know all the time, onboard at least. It's only the case if you're talking about a particularly pointed and/or mean humour, cf "banter" culture in the UK (destroy destroy destroy).

sincerity is not the opposite of humor
xpost

otm - it's very strange to me that several people seem to think that it is

Agree... with the false dichotomy bit (xxp)

In terms of humor born of fear, it seems that there are basically two types (aside from the aforementioned 'ineptly going through the motions of a joke' humor) that have become widely: distancing humor as defense mechanism/tension release valve (present in and undercutting every horror movie made these days) and humor that directly addresses sources of blight and sadness (a la The Soup). I'm not a fan of the former.

I think there may be some confusion (possibly on my part) as to whether we're addressing humor ITTA on a cultural level or on a personal level. I hold humor in very high esteem on a personal level (a compatible sense of humor is probably the number one determinant of how compatible I'm likely to be with another person), but I also hold the appropriate demarcation of humor in very high esteem. Culturally, that demarcation seems to be a highly-permeable membrane (and almost unselectively so, at times) anymore because of that fear born of not knowing how to communicate with one another anymore as antiquated social bonds crumble. Instead of directly addressing the problem of Bowling Alone, we crack wise about how we're bowling alone to stave off some heavy existential terror.

Humour is an effective tool but a dark art. One shouldn't wield it unless one knows what they're doing.

This times 10000000 (culturally speaking).

And using humour to amuse yourself primarily?

i think if anything as we've bowled more frequently alone we've gotten less funny, unless you count quoting high-grossing comedies at each other as being funny. a lot of the stuff people are (rightly) complaining about in this thread isn't funny; it's just noise. plenty of people with no sense of humor constantly make jokes.

calling someone who only amuses himself funny is like calling someone who well i'm sure you can finish this

distancing humor as defense mechanism/tension release valve (present in and undercutting every horror movie made these days) and humor that directly addresses sources of blight and sadness (a la The Soup). I'm not a fan of the former.

you might not be a fan of humor as a defense mechanism, but it provides a serious, helpful psychological benefit to many people who are in real need of a defense mechanism. some situations can't be directly dealt with, so "staving off existential terror" is the only possibility.

Thinking about humour at a presumption of familiarity - this is only the case for me when there are power dynamics involved. I don't want my new boss making certain kinds of jokes around me, especially if they're even relatively mild ones at my expense, or that of someone else in the team. But humour in other directions breaks down boundaries, it's a lot harder to get to the level of familiarity without it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyL8sKJJUHU

calling someone who only amuses himself funny is like calling someone who well i'm sure you can finish this

― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour), Thursday, March 1, 2012 7:27 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol this was supposed to read "calling someone funny who only amuses himself is like calling someone sexy who well i'm sure you can finish this", obviously i am not the authority on jokes that i thought

calling someone who only amuses himself funny is like calling someone who well i'm sure you can finish this

Don't think anyone said that, but being funny without amusing yourself sounds interesting

it really is worth reading the whole thing, but in bergson's conclusion he says:

Laughter is, above all, a corrective. Being intended to humiliate, it must make a painful impression on the person against whom it is directed. By laughter, society avenges itself for the liberties taken with it. It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness.

Shall we be told that the motive, at all events, may be a good one, that we often punish because we love, and that laughter, by checking the outer manifestations of certain failings, thus causes the person laughed at to correct these failings and thereby improve himself inwardly?

Much might be said on this point. As a general rule, and speaking roughly, laughter doubtless exercises a useful function. Indeed, the whole of our analysis points to this fact. But it does not therefore follow that laughter always hits the mark or is invariably inspired by sentiments of kindness or even of justice.

To be certain of always hitting the mark, it would have to proceed from an act of reflection. Now, laughter is simply the result of a mechanism set up in us by nature or, what is almost the same thing, by our long acquaintance with social life. It goes off spontaneously and returns tit for tat. It has no time to look where it hits. Laughter punishes certain failings somewhat as disease punishes certain forms of excess, striking down some who are innocent and sparing some who are guilty, aiming at a general result and incapable of dealing separately with each individual case. And so it is with everything that comes to pass by natural means instead of happening by conscious reflection. An average of justice may show itself in the total result, though the details, taken separately, often point to anything but justice.

Hah, this is sort of what I was getting at in the other thread

well that's a big question i think. humour seems to have a self-protective function as much as a reaching out function, and of course there's whole sections of humour designed to hurt or belittle. but now more than ever i feel like "being funny" is in some way at the heart of social discourse.

Well yeah, what you protect and what you belittle are part of your social "signature" - laughter is just a measure function over it. The quickest I've ever made a friend was by watching a multi-person comedy show with someone and seeing what they laughed at and what they didn't.

I'm actually quite funny IRL in the right settings, but rarely bother to try on ILX. and then when I'm writing reviews etc I find myself making humorous bits, but I doubt they're really funny, especially once they go out to public. Problem is once you've stared at, proofed and redrafted, what was once an amusing idea tends to have lost any impact whatsoever, so it's impossible to know whether someone reading for the first time would find it light-hearted and fun or stilted and embarrassing.

So take out the jokes then? Well it's not that simple - often humour can work as a structural device - it's easier to "show" rather than "tell" with humour. It can be a useful way of making a point or moving commentary along without resorting to bland matter-of-factness.

xpost to n/a

Yeah, but again we're in that hazy territory where I don't know exacly whether we're discussing humor as a tool of interpersonal communication here or humor as it's used on a broader cultural level. On an interpersonal level, pressure release humor is highly valuable in the moment.

There is "I can joke about this because it's not important to me", and "I can joke about this because it is important to me" and in my experience most people really really can tell the difference very quickly.

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

Absolutely not and under no circumstances - the best people have things that they very definitely have no sense of humour about (in public at least)

Don't think anyone said that, but being funny without amusing yourself sounds interesting

― Charles Kennedy Jumped Up, He Called 'Oh No'. (Tom D.), Thursday, March 1, 2012 7:31 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah i wasn't accusing anyone here of saying that, just talking about humor as retreat/insulation vs. humor as engagement/understanding; they are technically similar but not really the same thing or of the same value at all.

some people are funny without amusing themselves! they're good at letting you see inside a mind that is sufficiently different from yours to be unexpected and exciting for you but has never really been so for them. altruists of humor!

and some people you're just laughing at, obv

Also there's a difference between sincerity and self-importance.

See also: "Can't you take a joke?" as a tool of absolute cunts.

I don't know exacly whether we're discussing humor as a tool of interpersonal communication here or humor as it's used on a broader cultural level.

I don't think there's a difference TBH!

Like, the entire function of humor is bound up with connecting the individual to the broader culture. (It's similar to gossip in this respect)

the problem i have with most humour i encounter is how LAZY it is, it's entirely dependent on clichés and archetypes and reducing things to easy, recognisable targets when you can't be bothered to engage - and often it's just space filler, an attempt at the most basic type of "bonding" that's more about the joker trying to score half a brownie point with his or her perceived peers than about the subject of the "joke"

i guess, insofar as i like any humour, it's the really dry, incisive type borne of an insider's actual knowledge - the kind of witty comparison or turn of phrase that makes me think the person making it knows their shit, rather than drawing on received wisdom for an easy laugh. marina hyde excels at this!

i do not know how to be funny, let alone in a "light" way, and this has been the subject of wrangles with several editors in my time (I DO NOT DO JOKES), but insofar as i can be humorous in writing, it's only ever when i don't really care about my subject or don't particularly care about being accurate, which says a lot. if i love something i can't joke about it!

also no professional comic i have ever encountered has made me laugh, or indeed made me do anything except purse my lips in really intense disapproval to disguise my RAGE at their temerity

It's quite illuminating to see the people whose first thought about humour is as a barbed weapon with someone at the butt of it.

i didn't realize there was a humor epidemic in the UK?

am i the only person not feeling the "tyranny of humor" around me?

Did anyone actually say that this is true for them?

― wolf kabob (ENBB), Thursday, March 1, 2012 7:17 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

was a response to this:

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

― Streep? That's where I'm a-striking! (darraghmac), Thursday, March 1, 2012 6:23 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

also no professional comic i have ever encountered has made me laugh, or indeed made me do anything except purse my lips in really intense disapproval to disguise my RAGE at their temerity

See, that is amusing to me

i'm surprised the word "banter" hasn't cropped up itt yet #LADS

Esp. RAGE in capitals

it cropped up upthread iirc someone said "banter culture"

What does it mean?

lex, we've only met briefly a couple of times so i don't know, but do you consider yourself to be funny/have a sense in day-to-day life, or is this only a policy in yours and others' media?

though weirdly i don't have much of an issue with banter IRL, as opposed to as a cultural phenomenon (maybe because no one i hang out with engages in ~banter~ except a few people i went to university with, who i see like once every 6 months, it's quite fun being a slightly different person in those times)

also, yes, of course, humor v sincerity is a "false dichotomy" if we take the opposition as complete and absolute. it is, nevertheless, a useful means of opposing two different and at times seemingly opposing tendencies in human communication.

Except Lex you use humour all the time in everyday conversation with people and laugh when people make jokes in the pub, and you like a lot of artists for whom humour is an integral part of their appeal.*

*Unless 'How Many Licks' is an earnest academic study of cunnilingus, which I'm not ruling out.

xps i like to laugh, i have many friends who are good at witty bons mots, and occasionally i think of one myself, they are kind of different to wider cultural humour though

Except Lex you use humour all the time in everyday conversation with people

i don't mean to i didn't mean it it wasn't my fault

i didn't realize there was a humor epidemic in the UK?

am i the only person not feeling the "tyranny of humor" around me?

― the late great, Thursday, March 1, 2012 10:50 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No.

Contend - yeah, I saw that later. Sorry.

I think of "banter" in the Corden usage as the point at which straight-up bullying pretends to be mild teasing between people on a level playing field. See also Just A Bit Of Fun.

also, banter as homosocial bonding strategy among (certain kinds of?) str8 men to avoid having to ~talk about anything~. it's usually quite self-aware, in fact hyper-self-aware.

the late great - no, I don't really get this either. if someone's trying to be funny, i hardly find it to be an affront to the senses - if it makes me laugh, jolly good; if it doesn't, i politely ignore it and move on. this goes for IRL, writing and TV/film. What I don't like is when you get "comedies" that seem to avoid humour altogether - I'm thinking Scrubs or You, Me & Dupree or something equally heinous where you're suddenly under the realisation that there are NO JOKES, just comedic pacing and delivery. That fucks me off. The latest Noel Fielding is a rare but recent example of something that actively makes me cringe at its humour.

That show is possibly the worst thing I have ever seen.

It belongs both here and on this thread:

NOT FUNNY.

This is a great thread idea. It's legitimately fascinating to me to read everyone's different takes on the function of humor.

the problem i have with most humour i encounter is how LAZY it is, it's entirely dependent on clichés and archetypes and reducing things to easy, recognisable targets when you can't be bothered to engage - and often it's just space filler, an attempt at the most basic type of "bonding" that's more about the joker trying to score half a brownie point with his or her perceived peers than about the subject of the "joke"

― lex pretend, Thursday, March 1, 2012 3:48 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

While I think this applies to a lot of the humour I hate too, I will actually stick up somewhat for the operation of tropes as social intercourse. Being pretty socially maladjusted in myself, sometimes in an awkward situation it can be good to fall back on a clichéd method of interaction, because it allows everyone involved to know where they stand, and can provide an entry point into a more meaningful interaction later. I think I allow humour to provide this more because I can kind of do it, whereas I loathe small talk used for this purpose because I am *terrible* at it.

xps i like to laugh, i have many friends who are good at witty bons mots, and occasionally i think of one myself, they are kind of different to wider cultural humour though

― lex pretend, Thursday, 1 March 2012 15:54 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is interesting. I have good friends who have the ability to make me laugh like a drain with just a couple of words or even a look, but for something to be universally accepted as funny it has to be hierarchically filtered until the effect dissipates. The most effective humour works because the audience is "in on the joke" - so a private joke between friends has a massive impact among a very narrow group of people. A joke about someone slipping on a banana skin is about as used and universal as it gets - the oldest joke in the book and therefore not funny. But (assuming no one gets hospitalised), if it happens to you, or your mate, or if it happened the day before and then you see a cartoon about it happening, then there's a personal connection there.

banter as homosocial bonding strategy among (certain kinds of?) str8 men to avoid having to ~talk about anything~. it's usually quite self-aware, in fact hyper-self-aware

Talking about 'things' is boring though, nothing wrong with a bit of light relief

There's been too much traffic on this thread in between to respond to anything else, but I just wanted to clarify that SNARK (and other reflexive "banter" "humour") is the opposite of sincerity. Not that all humour is.

I don't think I actually want to contribute any more to this thread, there's too much possibility for misunderstanding.

I mean...

It's quite illuminating to see the people whose first thought about humour is as a barbed weapon with someone at the butt of it.

...yes, isn't it odd how it's often the people who *are* or have been at the butt of it who have that instinctive reaction!

i think the larger issue beyond how everything under the broad umbrella of humour works on an individual level is what NV was getting at with the opening post - this culture of enforced comedy, the ubiquity of the "light" "humorous" tone. the comedy industrial complex misunderstands why humour works, when it does. the things i find funniest aren't JOKES or fundamentally unfunny people racing to wring every last, laboured pun out of a situation, they're often unintentional turns of phrases or personal styles that i find entertaining even though on the face of it there's nothing to find funny. the things that make me laugh don't usually set out to do so. humour should be natural, not effortful. this is why PROFESSIONAL COMEDIANS NEED TO BE LOCKED UP FOR LIFE.

Why aren't snark and banter "sincere"? Maybe we're using different definitions of that word, but I'd say they're both sincerely attempting to enforce a set of social norms via the humiliation of laughter.

lex I agree with you insofar as the best standups usually sound like they're just talking off the top of their head.

the nature of their profession necessitates quite unseemly effort

they're basically whores

actually untrue, i have nothing against whores and the greatest of respect for them, which CANNOT BE SAID OF COMEDIANS

Yeah, being a sex worker is an ancient and honourable tradition. Being someone who stands on a stage and tells ~jokes~ for a living is deeply, deeply suspect.

(Y'know, I say I'm gonna stop participating in a thread, and then go on to post 6 times in a row, sheesh, edit your bookmarks, woman.)

the other thing that prompted this question was i was delivering some training last week and used a clip of The Office to illustrate a point and as i was doing it i thought "fuck me i am become what this is satirising". god knows i have nothing against humour but i am thinking that humour is now cherished above all other thought and meaning in our culture and our social relationships and i'm not sure that, for all humour's good and therapeutic qualities, the dominance is healthy

(fundamentally agree with lex re: stand-ups tho)

lex's hatred of comedy is god's gift to comedy

lex I agree with you insofar as the best standups usually sound like they're just talking off the top of their head.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, 1 March 2012 16:31 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's what makes stand-up so difficult, and why only the best stand-ups work though. stand-up is like a game - it's trying to make the audience forget the fact they're sitting there waiting for someone to make them laugh. Standing in front of several hundred people with their arms folded, many of them poised to watch you fuck up, and then trying to figure out a way into their individual nexes, something utterly personal to them and their beliefs and experiences - if you can do that, that's a fucking talent. Problem is, not many can.

One of the problems with standup is that like every other cultural product it's been subject to a relentless ratcheting up of the thrills per minute that the audience expects. There are literally software programs that will calculate laughs per minute and comedians use them to "improve" their own material and clubs will use them to determine who to book. The consequence of this is that comedians need to go the shortest route possible to a laugh, which means jokes that play on widely held assumptions, i.e. lazy generalizations and sterotypes that everyone is familiar with. There's very little room for an up-and-coming comedian to explore and hone material that goes deeper into the weeds, the way Richard Pryor's early 70s standup did, or Lenny Bruce, Whoopi Goldberg, etc

Stewart Lee? Much of his stand-up manages to take the slow route.

lex's hatred of comedy is god's gift to comedy

the beauty of it is that lex's hatred of comedy is clearly a form of comedy

There is, in my experience, a generational gap in terms of how "social funny" works. With young'uns, it seems that the main aim is a race to the punchline, with the horrendous diminishing returns of people echoing on the punchline (I mean, really, humour depends on the unexpected, so following up a successful joke someone else has made with a version of that same joke is to misunderstand what it takes to be funny). With older folk, there's an element of competitiveness, yes, but the effort involved is greater - the aim seems to be to be funny through a story, or tale, with the members of the group each pitching in with stories on the same or similar topics - the jokes are spread out but the social rewards are greater (and less concerned - though they still are, often - with oneupmanship).

Being a stand-up is kind of like being a DJ I suppose. You have to pre-empt the audience's reactions and be ready to change at any point. The other type of good stand-up is one who reaches in and pulls you into their world rather than trying to figure out the audiences' personal blend. I really like Harry Hill as a stand-up, for instance, and he's a very Marmite comedian, but for me it's the way you either have to accept and embrace his universe, or just walk out confused and unmoved.

calumerio - you got any examples of this? i'm not sure i understand

LOL youngster

Stewart Lee? Much of his stand-up manages to take the slow route.

Yeah it seems there are certain elder statesmen that get lifetime passes out of the requirement to have X number of laugh lines per set. In Stewart Lee's case, he actually gets to have 0!

the expectation s lee sets up and operates under somewhat undermines the 'laughs per min' notion tho

I get what you're all saying but

1) has comedy not been one equal side of the coin since the beginning of culture? i can think of an equal number of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies an though we ten to only teach the Greek tragedies i dont see earlier cultures as necessarily more self-serious than ours (anybody else seen roman graffiti?)

The fact that laughter is so physically hard-wired into our bodies makes me think that humor has been a big part of human life for a very long time.

you got any examples of this?
None that I could render funny. With that warning, the examples I was thinking about were:

a) in a professional setting, younger people when networking (yick, yes, but you have to do it) will punchline the fuck out of the conversation, killing any momentum stone dead, which leaves you with either non sequitur or "have you been on any nice holidays?" Older, more experienced hands will usually end up going (very roughly) turn about on stories - filling the networking time with likely heavily embroidered tales, the occasional punchline tossed in from the sidelines but generally a lot of respect for the storyteller (unless they are shit at telling stories).

b) when I was younger pub chat was all about hitting jokes hard and fast (and - as has been discussed above - avoiding talking about real things, about what we think and feel), instituting almost an informal ranking within our peergroup as to who was funniest, a bit of an arms race. Pub chat with my folks and their peers, though, was always about telling (and retelling) of stories - of family members, loved village idiots, the time your uncle colin tried to jump the leeds liverpool canal - which was humour and storytelling as a cohesive social experience.

I think that as I tend towards my decrepitude, I am prefering more and more the storytelling approach. Maybe I am projecting. Maybe I haven't the energy anymore.

distancing humor as defense mechanism/tension release valve (present in and undercutting every horror movie made these days)

hoo boy do i have a list of movies to change your mind on this

I feel like this thread taps into something I've been feeling about irreverance as the new dominant cultural mode. Maybe "levity" is a better word, but just basically the idea that nothing should be taken seriously, no statement should be delivered with unflinching authority or certainty, everything has to make fun of itself, etc. I find this most present in advertising, where it seems like even tax prep services and cancer drugs use guitar-playing lolcats to sell.

I also find that there's a kind of tyranny of humor even within comedy -- like every comedy series on television now has its jokes on top of one another to the point that they drown out plot, character, etc.

re: banter/snark vs sincerity, i think this is def an off opposition - i have several friends that can comfortably be considered lifelong (25+ years) and when in the same room (or internet) we spend lots of circulating around a honed banter core, but that is something born out of the most intimate of knowledge of each other and the safest and securest of relationships.

And what calumerio says as well -- I really find that it infects personal conversation at work and with all but the closest friends, so that everything is an arms race to be witty and drop as many references as possible and the center of conversation never holds.

It's one thing to do it with people you have known since you are 15. It's quite another to do it, reflexively, with *everyone*, including people you only know, from, say an office environment?

yeah but thats a problem of misapplication, not with humor itself

idk i think that maybe people are connoting humor w/overfamiliarity here in some cases?

It's all pretty arbitrary this. Very hard to say whether "banter" is funny or not - it's all about context as with any joke. And obviously timing, setting, how it's presented etc..

like id prefer that peeps i dont know well dont just jokey insult me out of the blue, but id rather they did that than give me a hug or ask about my wife

With respect to people who make/perform comedy as a career, I'm generally not a fan of most modular comedy (wherein a tried and true formula or structure is employed with workmanlike efficiency). Which, I guess, means I'm not a fan of most comedy, although I consider myself a huge comedy fan. Sometimes it works (I think How I Met Your Mother continues to be a fine purveyor of the standard multi-camera sitcom template, for example), but it's usually more about desperately clinging to a proven economic model (and therefore pretty much comedic anathema) than a choice per se. The best comedy is in some way surprising or revelatory, but the majority of people making comedy don't seem at all interested in surprising anyone. It really is just commerce, by and large (he said, surprising no one).

distancing humor as defense mechanism/tension release valve (present in and undercutting every horror movie made these days)

hoo boy do i have a list of movies to change your mind on this

Ha. I know all too well that you do! I should have said "most mainstream horror movies". But as a fan of the genre, I know you know what I'm talking about. There's a slew of horror movies that just plain don't work as horror movies because they have one foot out the door of ironic remove.

If you ever need to remind yourself of the "alternative" to snark and banter, it's possibly even worse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Sincerity

My wife coined (I think) the term "fashionably nice" for an attitude we found a lot in the last few years at art-related stuff. I think that probably relates to "New Sincerity."

http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320441466l/160767.jpg

"Fashionably nice" is a great phrase

no yeah i figured haha! i agree though, i almost nominated deadgirl in the comedy poll but i was afraid people might watch it and think i was like the creepiest dude alive (and thats one of the few that do it well!) xpost to mr haircare

"For Common Things" came out 12 years ago, btw

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

- David Foster Wallace writing in 1993

which is what, two years after the Simpsons started?

E Unibus Plurum, iirc? That totally blew my mind when I read it in college (several years after it was written). So DFW predicted, and perhaps helped to create, Jonathan Safran Foer. Thanks?

:/

i don't even understand the premise of 90% of this thread, unless it's just that people conflate "having a sense of humor" with "being sarcastic all the time"

I think "being funny all the time" is kind of more than just "being sarcastic all the time"

I have no particular beef with the tyranny of humor, especially when humor bespeaks a kind of humility, but snideness, while occasionally fun, when taken in excess leads to utter dickishness and irrelevance.

I feel like this thread taps into something I've been feeling about irreverance as the new dominant cultural mode. Maybe "levity" is a better word, but just basically the idea that nothing should be taken seriously, no statement should be delivered with unflinching authority or certainty, everything has to make fun of itself, etc. I find this most present in advertising, where it seems like even tax prep services and cancer drugs use guitar-playing lolcats to sell.

well i think with advertising i think it's mainly that everyone realizes now on some level that advertising is bullshit so it's pretty much impossible to do "sincere" advertising anymore

irony is pretty much our primary tool as a feeling species and eventually when all of us who grew up in the 1990s are finally dead people will remember that the word doesn't mean "making fun of stuff" but refers to an attunement to the failure of expectations that is at root deeply humble, and that since probability and not physics is on some level the mother of the sciences lacking or failing to develop this sense is like never understanding that objects move when you push them, i.e., you won't ever have any idea what's going on

― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour), Thursday, March 1, 2012 9:08 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is p great

2) is there not also a simultaneous culture of sincerity / drama happening all around us? aren't "reality tv shows" full of SERIOUS (OVERBLOWN) HUMAN DISAGREEMENT and wrangling on important issues? what about the "i'm okay, you're okay" culture of daytime talk shows (oprah, etc)? emo music? livejournal? what about the fever pitch of international political wrangling and post 9/11 malaise?

Although I do like a lot of stuff that I guess would fall under the heading of New Sincerity, there's also a lot of douchey flotsam that tends to wash up on that shore.

I just re-read "E Unibus Pluram" recently. It's a fantastic essay and really germaine to the discussion in this thread. As is a lot of stuff DFW discusses in Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

xpost -- I feel like this is something slightly different from the irony/sincerity issue that has already been so heavily dissected. It's more of a pervasive unseriousness in everything that I'm talking about.

Hazlitt: "Humour is the describing the ludicrous as i tis in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy."

well i dunno, maybe some of you are just surrounded by assholes?

i have a lot of trouble seeing this as a worldwide cultural phenomenon, it reads a lot more like "OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD" or whatever

Tbf, the cloud was blocking the light

"comedy industrial complex" was pretty funny

When I'm writing something it comes naturally to me to insert maybe a little bit of humour. But often I read back something after it's published and just think "what was I doing?!". Humour is an effective tool but a dark art. One shouldn't wield it unless one knows what they're doing.

― Alexandre Dumbass (dog latin), Thursday, March 1, 2012 7:04 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is so, so otm.

I've been thinking a lot about the original post, especially that line from the young people that "a light and humorous tone is more important than anything" .... something about that notion is just so depressing to me.

So many people I know, especially coworkers, treat 'seriousness' as a negative. Like you can't dispense good news without being funny and up and light and breezy and it's just so FAKE. They seem to cling to this notion that 'happiness' is some kind of permanent emotion that they can attain by only reading things that make them laugh, and instead, in my opinion, avoiding seriousness of any kind, especially in writing, turns you into a moron. How on earth can anyone engage with 'lightness'.

Just... ugh! And i'm a happy, laughing person in general, I love humour, I love standup comedy (sorry lex)...but only where it fits. I don't want to laugh all the time.

Any my rhetorical question to the young people, isn't there any consideration for establishing an original voice with which to dispense your information, rather than using the same voice that 10,0000 bajillion blogs are already using? And using it allll the time just dilutes the message.

Kinda feel like this is not what everyone else is talking about though, plus I'm kind of flailing around anyway so as you were...

i tend to use humor in most situations that have no particular gravity or need for seriousness. IRL, that's maybe half the time. on ILX, that's pretty much all the time.

xp

nah it is part of what i was getting at inbetween yelling at clouds

i'm only intermittenly jokey in my professional writing, and i used to be even more dry when i started out. one of the first places i wrote for had a habit of inserting terrible jokes into my pieces, which i really hated in a way that i generally don't resent other forms of editorial intervention, like if there's anything you should retain of a writer's style it should be their tone, their sense of humor or level of seriousness.

Does one insert humor into sentences or does it happen naturally? genuinely curious

So many people I know, especially coworkers, treat 'seriousness' as a negative

i just ... i don't have this problem! and i work with teenagers!

I'll introduce you to my workplace, late great

and i'll introduce you to mine!!

:D

ILX work exchange program wd be excellent

there are just so many counterexamples to everything on this thread!

i think i phrased the initial fuzzy thoughts as tentatively as i cd. i'm all for counter-examples, a few have occurred to me since i started. and i was thinking more of the sphere of public discourse than human interaction in general, i think.

Too many coworkers treat humor as a negative.

I've noticed a verrrrry slight shift change in the college students I work with or see: they'll use "hating" or "haters" if you insult a star, athlete, or other Beloved Person. There's a real scorn for what they call "negativity."

i think there's a big UK/US divide here

although, y'know, gawker, so maybe not, idk

Feed them shit, Alfred, and see whether they look askance at 'hating' that.

even in the sphere of public discourse, i find it hard to defend the claim that today's culture is somewhat "lighter" or less serious than that of the past.

it does seem like there's a big US/UK divide ... is it because in the past you guys basically only had paternalistic high-minded quality public programming on TV & radio and now you have the same wasteland of for-profit TV as the US?

so you're saying modern Yoo Kay culture has made them sour

my entire life philosophy boils down to "take things as seriously as you have to, but be as honest as painfully possible" so I don't really see the sincerity/humorous divide, either

on the other hand, irony/sarcasm for its own sake is really, really annoying

Ta-Nehisi Coates Rules, The Thread

FYI

Not a bad philosophy, Dan. Personally, I find it hard to take pretty much anything too seriously (even the things I'm generally quite serious about), and I see everything within the broad span of human endeavor as a source of both awe and guffaws, depending on the perspective one employs at a given time. And I think the best and most admirable humor has a healthy balance of both.

Seriousness should be reserved for subjects and situations where its application makes a material difference to your own life or the lives of people you come into contact with. However, this shouldn't be used as a license to treat everything else with frivolity. There is a middle ground, you know.

Also, anyone who cannot and does not aim humor at themselves should be disbarred from aiming it at anyone else.

(Now I will go back and read the whole thread.)

Earnestness/sincerity are perfectly fine in many ways, but as personality traits aren't they v close to the bottom of the list of 'positives' you'd ideally be looking for in ppl you've to spend time with?

No. When I married my wife she had very little idea of humor and was nearly incapable of saying anything funny, including not knowing how to tell a programmatic joke with a punchline. But I can make her laugh. We are still married after 28 years.

Her quality of earnestness is valuable to me, because it makes her extremely trustworthy and perservering. When things go wrong, she is deeply committed to finding out how to make them go right again. That has helped immeasurably over the decades.

Humor is a leaven in one's character, to keep it from too much density and heaviness of spirit, but humor as the basis of one's character can be a disaster, if there is no graivty to offset it.

I feel this way sometimes. We can't shut up, so we make stupid jokes. Maybe if we had religion we could be solemn over that. Otherwise the only occasions are funerals.

tbf and all, i noted sincerity as a positive trait, i acknowledge it as such. Personally speaking there're just loads of better ones, ymmv obv.

From Trayce's DFW quote:

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.

Paradox: the complete refusal of seriousness may emerge from the fear of being seen as ridiculous.

the complete refusal of humour can come from the same source

The complete refusal of either is rare, though

Humo(u)r is an unproductive emotion.

It produces laughter.

laughter is another tyrannical byproduct of human physiology that needs to be eliminated.

the thing makes a good point

what do funny things and painful things have in common? they both make it hard to speak. ever wonder about that?

also toffee

death to toffee

Did you hear about Agger, banaka? Not good.

From Trayce's DFW quote:

What? I have neither posted in this thread nor ever read any Foster Wallace.

In fact I was about to come in and express frustration that yet again, the conversation's moved on before I got a chance to comment on bits of it thanks to the stupid time difference :( most annoying thing about being an ILXor in this country.

jesus christ lady you woke us just to tell us THAT?

Haha :) Actually I wanted to commen on this from way back at the start:

English (in particular) notoriously obsessed/associated with mocking, belittling, cynical humour.

This is curious to me because, I would have agreed with it, but then I experienced the clash between UK and australian senses of humour. I had a bf from England at one point, and he was often very upset/offended by things people here said; he said we are all rude and sarcastic and aggressive, but it was the larrikin aussie humour* that he was getting cross at. Casual lighthearted dry humour, somewhat rude nicknames, that sort of thing. Australians can be relentlessly ...almost bullying, maybe? with thier humour at times.

*ugh kill me for using that phrase

Then again maybe he was just a humourless twat.

Sorry, Trayce. It was Tracer Hand's quote.

Heh yeah I suspected it might be. 'shappened before, all good.

wrt to that English type of humour, Trayce, just wanted to say I'm not at all certain about it! Feel it's a thing that is said, a lot, but wd want to look a lot more closely before saying that sort of humour wasn't a class thing.

Did want to put it forward as a counterweight to the idea that we... ah fuck this phone, I've gotta get up and write this now?

This whole thread turned v v weird for me, the initial idea was interesting but the extension into people using humor in their real lives as a net negative is just baffling. Note: I am pretty much happy and kinda O_O at how holy shit awesome the world (mostly) is 90% of the time so humor/levity seem kinda inextricable from my world view? Idk.

otm

So, continuing from above: ...counterweight to the idea that this is something new, or getting worse in some way.

wrt NV's Tyranny of Humour in 'public discourse', the first thing I thought of was punning headlines. They're not quite symbolic of the subject because they've become such a thing in themself, but they are representative of a continual, unfunny noise of non-seriousness. (Honorable exceptions like Foot Heads Arms Body/Book Lack in Ongar/Caley Thistle etc aside). This sort of thing has become pernicious beyond headlines, puns that aren't puns, non-directional irony or cynicism, whatever it is Brooker does where he says (thing) is like (absurd something else), we might as well (absurd action).

Where it's become more noticeably pernicious is in, say, politicians' speeches. Cameron and Osborne's funnies in their speeches have been extraordinarily ill-advised and have generated headlines as a consequence. But clearly they feel the need to do it.

Where public starts affecting private is in the concept of 'banter' I think. Top Gear blokey jokiness. That sort of humour (read 'general non-serious, gurning tone guess that must be FUNNY right?') seems to me very prevalent just generally as a thing you hear around the place. It seems to me horrible because it co-opts the listener into a moral view - the implicit message being, you're not laughing because you don't understand 'fun', rather than because you object to their capering imbecilities.

The worst of this is with colleagues you don't like and bosses. You can't not laugh/smile, unless you are a bastard of steel (I occasionally go as far as a thin smile, or just wait for the forced hilarity to die down and carry on with whatever was being talked about in a normal tone of voice). And so you are once again co-opted.

As for comedy, well generally the stuff that makes me laugh is stuff that occurs spontaneously in conversation/during the day/in my head. It is not related to the mechanics of performed humour generally. I guess I like the mechanics of how to create laughter when it comes off, but the number of things I find funny in performance comedy is so generally miniscule that I'm happy going with lex on this one and saying I hate comedy, especially stand-up.

There's just so much 'low-level funny' around that I find not at all funny, that yes, I do find there's a tyranny, both in the media and public discourse, but also in general talk around the place.

God, just rambling really, but Tyranny of Humour definitely strikes a chord, although yes, hard cultural differences wrt this as i think lex said upthread.

I thnk this whole thread's premise is quite thought provoking! For me anyway. The idea that humour really is in everything we enjoy is interesting bcz I immediately started racking my brains trying to think of anything i've enjoyed (movie, book etc) that was relentlessly humorless, or dark, or similar. I'm sure there have been such things. But of course, one comes away from such experiences feeling rather stained and exhausted or mentally violated or whatever ("Salo" might be a good example?). So does that mean it is not worth experiencing? Not saying anyone's suggested this, just thinking aloud.

FWIW I did not "enjoy" Salo one bit, in fact I never want to see it again and kind of wish I never had.

I really hate non-directional cynicism, you see it everywhere, it barely even registers as humour but it's become all pervasive, you see it in dreadfully written Metro intros, useless G2 recurring features like Pass Notes. The idea that everything is basically shit and scoffing at it should be the default mode of expression unless proven otherwise.

When I think of the tyranny of humour I also think of Alexis Petridis's Guardian album reviews, where he spends 2/3rd of the review laughing at his own jokes and the remaining third talking about the album. He used to restrict his stand-up routine to the first paragraph but it's expanded and expanded over the years.

it is broadly correct tho

I tried something out last night at a client-schmoozing event: the withdrawal of levity. Any participation I had in one to one discussion, or as part of some coalesced group, was deadly serious. This did not go well - people looked at me as if I had antlers. Perhaps this is because there is, in terms of face to face communication, a generally accepted (or tolerated) rule that you shall not bore your audience. Perhaps that has bled through to print and online media.

book etc ... that was relentlessly humorless, or dark, or similar
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I don't recall that being funny, but I do recall feeling exhuasted afterwards...

Even Shakespearean tragedy uses humour as a release valve and/or commentary. Struggling to think of many great works of literature that don't utilise humour in some way.

The alternative is looking po-faced, and no one wants that when they're trying to make a serious point.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Thursday, March 1, 2012 2:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was thinking on reading the beginning of the thread that I'd come across a concept in a drama class that to make an interesting bad/evil character you had to establish a feeling of sympathy. If you didn't then the audience didn't really care what they did, they'd just be dismissive of the character. & one method of establishing this sense of sympathy was through humour. Could be the irony of the gap between the character's intentionality and reality or something else.
sorry started a thought but don't think I've got a proper conclusion.

it shd be pretty obvious that i'm as desperately crowd-pleasing and class clownish as any poster on board, so i'm certain that part of this train of thought is a dissatisfaction with myself. but i'm still unsure as to why - or if - humour is the great universalizer. i think the point woof made about unseriousness might be closer to how i'm thinking. this isn't humour vs humourlessness so much as need to please versus need to express, maybe.

but i'm still unsure as to why - or if - humour is the great universalizer

Fear of sex and death, probably.

If you can link it back to satire/mockery, it is the making small of things which are otherwise unpleasant or morbid maybe? Lilliputianisation... er.

I don't think humor is the great universalizer at all, I think it (litcrit pomo alert:) interpellates tribes. A joke hails you as a belonging to a certain group, an address you can accept (even if provisionally or strategically: the thin-lipped smile) or reject. It's when people's jokes interpellate you as a BOORISH ASSHOLE that it gets wearying.

i love the deployment of humour within a satirical context but i think it's telling that satire and humour have become conflated to the point where people assume that all satire must be humourous and that every "Cameron is a wanker" zing must be satire.

i have a whole side-notion in my head btw about neurodiverse people and the notion of an inability to process humour, but that is really far from where i was going here.

^otm, but then I don't think there's been any decent satire for years. No, scratch that, any satire at all? You might look in Private Eye I guess, but I think you'd look in vain for the most part (it's not really satirical?). Oh, Thick of It I suppose.

xpost.

also somebody raised upthread that there is also, for want of a better word, an emo culture which expresses itself in easily repeated psychological jargon and unexamined assumptions about the importance of being yourself, expressing yourself, and never being judged by anyone ever (except God, ymmv). but maybe that's too big to fit here either. i acknowledge that stuff functions as a counterweight to Red Nose Britain tho.

there's an issue for something like The Thick of It where the satirical comment is so close to the reality that it ceases to function as satire, cf. Kissinger and the Nobel Peace Prize etc

I was going to mention Private Eye in that it's a publication that's actually LESS humorous that you expect, once you get past the first few pages it's all investigative stuff and burning anger.

except the second half which is all remixes of the same jokes that Peter Cook was probably making in 1965 and i assume is the selling point to at least a good chunk of Eye readers?

and i assume Craig Brown is still doing his savant toff who read something about a celebrity in the Spectator once steez

actually the reason the Eye shdn't be counted as a satirical magazine now is because the satire is almost always the worst thing in there

ok so it turns out Craig Brown is Florence MacHine's uncle? huge lol

ok so it turns out Craig Brown is Florence MacHine's uncle? huge lol

!!!

there's an issue for something like The Thick of It where the satirical comment is so close to the reality

Definitely. Never really found The Office funny for that reason. It was just like an office. Which took me back to your original post (and woof's response) about whether humour is necessary.

I remember Wyndham Lewis wrote somewhere that all sorts of works are the better for being 'stiffened with satire' rather than being necessarily purely satirical (anyone who's read any of his purely satirical works will feel he has a point about limiting the amount of satire maybe).

I feel aesthetically that's right (and might operate only on a relatively unobtrusive level like externalising descriptions of people). Whether the same applies to humour I'm not so sure. I find black things funny. What woof said about Beckett upthread is relevant.

xpost lol.

i find black things v. funny. this is another point - often we bring the humour to what we're experiencing, it isn't necessarily present in the art work itself. i'll argue that Salo functions as black humour and i'm convinced that i'm right but it's obvious how you could miss it. the same wd go for a hell of a lot of cultural products. but is this eye for humour itself an expression of a sensibility that belongs to now?

No.

Cautious no.

like obviously some people have always seen humour in everything. but does the degree to which this is a thinkable response change thru time/geography? i'm almost convinced it does. po-faced Victorians like all cliches is obviously false and disprovable but societies do have a public face i think, a way that they like to think about themselves out loud and present themselves to themselves. we live in an informal age and i wd agree with the crustiest Telegraph curmudgeon on that point, tho our conclusions wd be different.

eg Ulysses now is funny in some of the same ways and in some very different ways than it was in 1922. or more accurately perhaps it was serious in different ways back then.

We live in an informal age compared to upper class urban Victorians but that's tilting the playing field a little bit!

I don't know why, maybe it's just a natural egotism, but people always seem to think that previous generations were less funny, more serious-minded, less sophisticated, easier to fool, etc etc.

the intent of the artist is of limited importance, i think, and proximity is an important part of that murky equation

and yeah 100 years ago only the worst kind of political demagogue wanted to be your friend, friend of the people.

Trace this isn't less, more, better, worse...this is different. I'm saying that societies and cultures are different to one another. They may even repeat the same mannerisms, but i don't buy a timeless universality of experience.

Couple of case studies I guess. The first a 'yes' to the suggestion it's an expression of 'now'. Kafka I found incredibly gloomy (obv) when I first read him as a teenager. Now I find him quite amusing to read. The endless fruitless attempts to get things done in the face of the way things are (yes it's more than that), why, it's Larry David! (no.)

Celine: black as hell, and often extremely funny in what is essentially a presentation the bleak absurd? Black humour funny as a consequence of existentialism? see also Beckett.

So, death of god results in black humour? v possibly. See also the transition of the word absurd from the unique impossible to 'lol'.

Wd want to try and look at Rabelais/Cervantes/Swift maybe in this context, but people be staring at me not doing work.

Is it egotism? Premise of this thread seems to be that this might not, in itself, be A Good Thing.

so that's me saying 'yes' I guess.

sorry, xposting like blazes.

and it's not "previous generations", it's public discourse. the way media and public figures address their audience. the ways it's considered seemly for adults to relate to each other in public.

also xposting like mad. cos i'll have to work again shortly.

There is some kind of irony in a thread about humour being humorously delinated :/

deliniated. gah.

I'm cautiously yes on a cultural shift towards the tendency to see humour. I get the feeling 30s-70s maybe were a great deal more serious about their Kafka, Beckett, Dostoevsky etc.

death of god results in black humour

god = high seriousness
aftermath of death of god = black humour
god dead and forgotten = tim vine

xp

yeah i'm thinking this, from the perspective of criticism. altho it's obviously not the only measure of how writers are received.

aftermath of death of god = black humour

fits nicely into Breton's Anthology of Black Humour

on an unrelated note a work colleague - somebody i don't work that often with - just signed off an email to me with a "xx". i'm not perturbed but i am v much "this is ok now?"

You do see it.

i guess it's kind of pleasant, i think what throws me is the shifting signification of the "x" from "kiss"

well, yes, the first few times I saw it, I thought that as well. Take it it's from a woman tho? (I've only ever had an x at the end of an email from a woman, denuded of any close affection obv).

fuckin denuded gotta stop using that word. esp that close to 'affection'.

yeah exacly it's kinda like an air kiss but then you wdn't air kiss a colleague either?

gotta go actually work yay friday

xx is a bit much, but x i see a bit.

Going to think about humour and the bleak void we stare at/stares at us.

it's even closer to the word "woman" FYI

xx

Most of the "humour" in Private Eye is in the centre pages, the stuff towards the back about industry and banking is back at the anger and investigation. I think that stuff has as much sarcasm per item at the Street of Shame, but it just takes longer to cut through the pomposity and obstructive layers so the items are longer, whereas the SoS is all "An excellent review by Gerald Starborgling in the Telegraph of the new John Hardt novel, but surely the novel was written by a different Sally Johnson than the one who has been shacked up with him for 10 years?"

That said my reading order is straight to the satirical "From The Forums" in the humour, then SoS / the book reviews / everything else.

Also modern satire in pure black tar form = Chris Morris, particularly Brass Eye.

Yep. That qualifies more than anything else in the last couple of decades I think.

And the non-special part of it is 15 years ago, because I am old.

on an unrelated note a work colleague - somebody i don't work that often with - just signed off an email to me with a "xx". i'm not perturbed but i am v much "this is ok now?"

lulz this was the exact subject and angle of a hand-wringing daily mail column yesterday

FUCK CHRIS MORRIS

FUCK THE OFFICE

FUCK PEEP SHOW WHILE WE'RE AT IT

FUCK DAVID MITCHELL AND HIS FUCKING OBSERVER COLUMN

i actually like some black humour, a certain strain of it, i'm thinking uhhh... the opposite of sex? heathers?

elegance is an absolutely crucial component of humour for me, and indeed the only quality that can redeem comedy

also no british people

Opinions running in a direct line from false to true, there.

Can there be comedy about poor people, lex?

maybe but the exceptions to the comedy rule are so rare that it's probably safer to say there should be no comedy at all, about anyone

there's also the issue of 'grace' in real-life/observed humor –– are we laughing because of relatability, because of discomfort, or because of mockery –- and how separable are the three?

fwiw, i do think that all (funny) comedy comes at somebody's expense, unless it is purely absurdist/verbal humor, in which case it's just an odd situ

You mean performed stuff or things that actually happen to someone?

David Mitchell's observer column is truly dreadful. Gives me the heebie-jeebies, weird combo of 'humour' and unpleasant assumed 'moral rationalism'. Elegance is an interesting component. Wd seem to come specifically from the fin-de-siecle (back to death of god/absolute truth)... avatars of 'elegant humour' Firbank? Wodehouse even? Sorry, coming at it from a lit. point of view. Must admit that appeals to my taste less.

I mean stuff that actually happens, Andrew. Or "reality" humor i.e. some idiot who posts a video of himself on youtube as he falls off a wall he's trying to balance beam (or w/e).

'assumed 'moral rationalism' - yes. Mitchell has a big dose of this. The Lib demmy thing.

I admire that elegance & compression & elision style more than I find it funny - the almost totally empty version in Firbank does nothing for me. Wilde is an obvs name to add on there. Can't think of much that goes for that tone now.

Swift's a tricky one w/r/t black humour and the death of god just because it's so hard to reconcile with his life. fwiw I think that it is manageable and that a academic-historicised 'He was a Tory CofI clergyman, you're misreading the satires' is totally inadequate, but I'm not sure I know enough even to sound the bottom of the question.

problem is in relating the texts too closely to the historical man i think, we can never know how much "Swift" was "in control" of say Tale of a Tub and yet because of him or despite him the satire escapes its nominal targets and sprays across religion and enlightenment and yeah sorry rationality altogether - but that isn't an invalid response as long as you're not committed to a strict auteurism

yeah, that does cut through it, I guess I just find the tangle of all this stuff in Swift's case - the relationship between intention, achievement, circumstance, personality & a kind of vision or sensibility - to be an unusual case, and one I come back to a bit.

The British people on this thread make me feel stupid; the Americans make me feel like an alien.

Humour is something that is very, very difficult for me, to understand and to process, on many levels.

I don't think it's actually elegance that makes humour acceptable. I've got into trouble before with stating that I implicitly dislike all *cruel* humour, because a laugh can be protective of a wince if it's properly aimed at a legitimate target, humour is an incisive weapon. But I think it's more that, for me, humour must be absurd, but not veering into the deliberately surreal, because that is seldom funny (the smarmy one from the Mighty Boosh springs unfortunately to mind) - but it's more the concept of the almost accidentally absurd, that it's impossible to aim for absurdity and hit, but if, when aiming for something else, one hits absurdity instead, that is very funny indeed.

Don't have a problem with humour, there is a time and place for it

Do have a problem with the idea that it has to be everywhere

This article is about the genre. For situation comedies featuring a predominantly African American cast, see Black sitcom.

I actually don't see the idea that Ulysses was differently funny 100 years ago. When it's funny, it always seems to be me deliberately funny, and like we're laughing at something that Joyce thought was funny, in the way he thought it was.

Dickens for comparison: when I hear people read out 'comic Dickens' it doesn't sound funny to me (but apparently does to others).

Surely there are genuinely funny people, like Steady Mike or 'Michael Jones' of ilx fame, whose humour is so perpetually high quality as to be unimpeachable in the name of a general principle

even if there are other people who are not very funny.

i fear that anyone going out of their way to read the funny bits of dickens to you is going to kill it

Exhibit H to the premise of this thread: footnote 43 on p. 23 of In Re El Paso Corporation Shareholder Litigation, an opinion written by Chancellor Leo Strine, possibly the most respected jurist in corporate law:

"Certain Chancery staff have experienced a troubling side effect to reading [the Blankfein-Foshee call transcript]: Lionel Richie's 1980's treacle, "Hello," came to mind and is stuck in their heads. See LIONEL RICHIE, Hello on CAN'T SLOW DOWN (Motown Records 1983) ("Hello!/Is it me you're looking for?/I can see it in your eyes/I can see it in your smile/You're all I've ever wanted/And my arms are open wide..../And I want to tell you so much I love you....")

i think it requires a certain level of work to get imaginative access to how & why some of the funny bits in ulysses remain funny

compare the scene where bloom takes a shit in ep iv to - say - the 'battleshits' section in 'harold & kumar' - a part of reading bloom "reading the second column with some exertion, and then relaxing through the third" requires us to suppose a context in which "and then bloom took a shit" was not a thing that could have been written

this is a different dynamic to, say, reading (now) the lists of names for genitalia in rabelais

Yup, and there's something communal/music hall, bit of a laugh, a few tears, about Dickens and humour (to think momentarily about its 'necessity' or otherwise).

I drifted off a bit thinking about this. Because I remember being at a second world war veterans sing-song in a pub - bear with me - and there were some sentimental songs and some bawdy songs, in the music hall tradition (Cock a Doodle Doo, the Fella that Played the Trombone) and everyone (including me and my friend) had a great time! And one of the old ladies said to me the not uncommon phrase 'It does you good to have a bit of a laugh doesn't it?'.

It was communal, by and large like-minded people, but other than that, how does it differ from, say, stand up? The humour and laughter is produced by the participants, but I'm not necessarily sure that's purely it, in the sense it derives from music hall, and the 'good' it does you is also present there, as performance. Formal rules? Rather than that often rather tedious free-form reliance on 'personality' for stand up? xpost

there's some old threads (might have been revived recently? i don't know) about how poorly served by history the idea of 'stand up comedy' is -- how the received narratives undermine most of how it works and has worked

there's more than one currently practicing comedian in stewart lee's idiom, incidentally

I don't think that's a very funny bit of Ulysses, which is the funniest book I have ever read that was not written by Flann O'Brien

did people use to think it was funny? actually not much evidence from 1922 says they did; they seem to have found it unpleasant when they mentioned it at all.

there does seem to me a gulf between the Dickens I've heard read out, and things I find funny - Myles, Joyce, Paul Morley, or indeed Wilde.

well okay tell us what you think the funniest bits of ulysses are and then tell us what the last class of undergraduates you were in thought the funniest bits of it were

and then we will know whether people find it funny in different ways to what they did in 1922. n.b. in this study you are standing in for a person from 1922 as the closest available living human being

i find black things v. funny.

... Thank you?

i've had fun in the past going through the 'black comedy' tags of movie websites and seeing either interpretation of the term used so freely that Undercover Brother sits next to American Psycho

I'm fairly certain that you and I would find different bits of Ulysses funny, pinefox.

xp Dickens is properly funny on the page. Not sure how it would take to being read out.

Spectacularly sustained comic performance by Lex on this thread.

In general I think ch12 and ch16 are probably the funniest episodes

in general, also, I think the later episodes of textual play and pastiche are funnier than the earlier 'realistic' ones

ch17 strikes me as possibly hilarious but also just as much awe-inspiring / ambitious / strange - the passage comparing Milly B to B's cat, for instance. something similar about ch15 perhaps: the entrance of 'the end of the world' or McIntosh's 'He is Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fire-raiser. His real name is Higgins' seem very funny to me, but the main effect is of daring and excess, as much as comedy.

first half of ch13 possibly pretty comic on the whole, but probably not to compare with ch16

in general I don't find what the Dubliners actually do and say fantastically funny, except in ch12

what's funnier is what the text does around them

see and I laugh at Mr Deasy's pomposities in Chapter 2 and the maudlin interjections of the funeral attendees in Chapter 6 (my favorite chapter).

I go to a reading group that reads ch6 at the rate of 12.5 lines per hour

funny in ch6: the insincerity of LB's 'it does' after Kernan's 'I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's heart'.

there is incidental funny stuff in every chapter re: how nasty bloom's tastes are or how down on everything stephen

Just catching up with a few things in this thread. It's moved so quickly, I can't catch up.

Where it's become more noticeably pernicious is in, say, politicians' speeches. Cameron and Osborne's funnies in their speeches have been extraordinarily ill-advised and have generated headlines as a consequence. But clearly they feel the need to do it.

I don't think this is new. Churchill was famous for his one-liners. Difference is when Cameron and Osborne do it, it's the equivalent of pantomime sorcerer coming on and making funnies at the expense of Widow Twankey and Buttons.

The worst of this is with colleagues you don't like and bosses. You can't not laugh/smile, unless you are a bastard of steel (I occasionally go as far as a thin smile, or just wait for the forced hilarity to die down and carry on with whatever was being talked about in a normal tone of voice). And so you are once again co-opted.

I hate this, particularly bosses. Had this the other day from a senior manager and if looks could kill...

As for comedy, well generally the stuff that makes me laugh is stuff that occurs spontaneously in conversation/during the day/in my head. It is not related to the mechanics of performed humour generally. I guess I like the mechanics of how to create laughter when it comes off, but the number of things I find funny in performance comedy is so generally miniscule that I'm happy going with lex on this one and saying I hate comedy, especially stand-up.

This is all very well, but it's a bit like saying "I don't like films and music, because they're prescribed and pre-meditated to make me feel things, whereas it's every day experiences that have the most impact". It's like saying you find it impossible to let your brain/ego accept the context of jokes being told, or an entertainer trying to make you laugh.

I just can't accept this worldview really. You'd have to reject all entertainment media by this rationale.

I really hate non-directional cynicism, you see it everywhere, it barely even registers as humour but it's become all pervasive, you see it in dreadfully written Metro intros, useless G2 recurring features like Pass Notes. The idea that everything is basically shit and scoffing at it should be the default mode of expression unless proven otherwise.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Friday, 2 March 2012 09:52 (20 minutes ago) Permalink

Are you making a statement in that last statement, or is this what you're against? It's Jack Dee humour, isn't it? I think ILX got a bit like this for a while - very snarky, everything's rise-worthy. There's different levels of this of course. I don't mind Pass Notes and Charlie Brooker too much, but I can see how they rankle a few people.

I agree with DC's statement quoted above

ugh, sorry about my writing in that last post - kept getting distracted by stupid work.

This is all very well, but it's a bit like saying "I don't like films and music, because they're prescribed and pre-meditated to make me feel things, whereas it's every day experiences that have the most impact". It's like saying you find it impossible to let your brain/ego accept the context of jokes being told, or an entertainer trying to make you laugh.

I just can't accept this worldview really. You'd have to reject all entertainment media by this rationale.

Not wrt to comedy I think. Because if you don't find it funny, having this thing that thinks it's funny capering around in front of you is immensely immensely irritating. 'Funny' is unusual because it's either funny or it's not, although you can also feel warmly sympathetic to good-humoured, warm-heartedness (Dickens), or perhaps other gradations, like wry amusement, but if it fails it fails absolutely.

yeah i feel like the difference between being a terrible musician and a terrible comedian is it's much easier to kid yourself you're not terrible as a musician: they don't get you. a comedian who makes nobody laugh has to jump thru some twisted mental hoops to convince themselves they're good at it.

I'm prone to liking stuff with jokes (or facing terrible universe with bitter stoic laughter etc), but unseriousness can be a real irritant – feel like Beckett is often pushed, nervously, as 'actually very funny', which is true, sure, but dodging some of the heart of it.

Totally otm, also find this similar to a lot of how humour is used to sell serious music - Mauricio Kagel, Cecil Taylor's vocals, Anthony Braxton's antics. Not that it isn't funny (Kagel has made a deal about making something that is funny and exploring the dimensions that humour can provide in performance), but its often told as funny, and then left on its own, no one wants to talk about some of the other non-funny qualities in the music. As if there ws an urgency about SELLING this to people.

The thing is it makes you laugh, but why does it do so? What are the implications of humour placed in something that has some very dry theories and techniques behind it?

I heard Weird Al say something that felt kinda true, of why he stayed a musician and never went into standup. Because if people didn't like his singing, they could still at least maybe enjoy the music behind it...whereas if you're not funny as a standup, that's it. That's all you've got, there's no real parachute.

xxpost Maybe so, but dismissing comedy outright in the extreme is... I dunno, fair enough - you get people who don't listen to music - but there's good comedy and terrible comedy and if anything's going to boil down to a matter of taste more than music, it's what makes us laugh. I just find it o_O that anyone can say they really dislike any and all examples of comedic entertainment.

Anyone can say anything; whether it turns out to actually be true is a completely separate matter.

stand-up has many unpleasantnesses that music doesn't have in the same way, as people are trying to explain

I have definitely listened to music that was just as unpleasant as stand-up comedy

i find black things v. funny. this is another point - often we bring the humour to what we're experiencing, it isn't necessarily present in the art work itself. i'll argue that Salo functions as black humour and i'm convinced that i'm right but it's obvious how you could miss it. the same wd go for a hell of a lot of cultural products. but is this eye for humour itself an expression of a sensibility that belongs to now?

― FPocalypto! (Noodle Vague), Friday, 2 March 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In Salo's case (and its a v specific case) is it distance provoking the humour? I guess if it was released just after the war it might have too damn much to read any humour into it, more anger (and satire), but by '75 or so there was just enough, and then when you think about what was happening in some countries in Europe at the time (or what wasn't)...the thing is by then there was breathing space.

stand-up is needier: a performer almost always tries to ingratiate themself or else do some "confrontational" shtick, but either way they are desperate for an audience to respond. some music does that, and some performers, but music doesn't need to. it can just sit around being music all day not caring how you feel about it.

I don't know, there's something pretty sad about bands dutifully playing against the backdrop of a roomful of people talking and ignoring them, or a DJ who can't get people dancing, or whatever.

re: Salo and distance i'm not wholly sure, because it may depend on how familiar the viewer is with Sade? if you watched the movie with nothing but the notion that the 120 Days existed, or not even that, then perhaps there'd be less irony. altho i think that just an awareness of Fascist superman fantasies might be enough to tip you the wink that the director is laughing at the protagonists' inadequacies. but on the other hand Bunuel was using Sade as material for satire, maybe the subject too, before the war. so i think it isn't a distance from the horror that makes for bitter laughs but a subversion of Fascist mythology that wd have still been humorous in 1945, tho obviously far more dangerous to explore.

like in one sense Salo is an extended riff on Jesus = Blangis in L'Age d'Or except with fascism (more or less) substituted for christianity

Yeah I ws trying to think how much I did or didn't know about Sade or European dictatorships of the 60s and 70s. Do remember laughing at the daring of it.

It was a restrained kind of laughter tho'. I did see it at the cinema.

stand-up is needier: a performer almost always tries to ingratiate themself or else do some "confrontational" shtick, but either way they are desperate for an audience to respond. some music does that, and some performers, but music doesn't need to. it can just sit around being music all day not caring how you feel about it.

― Mo Money Mo Johnston (Noodle Vague), Friday, 2 March 2012 17:22 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know, there's something pretty sad about bands dutifully playing against the backdrop of a roomful of people talking and ignoring them, or a DJ who can't get people dancing, or whatever.

― Homosexual Satan Wasp (Matt DC), Friday, 2 March 2012 17:26 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is interesting. Whenever I'm DJing and no one seems to be dancing, I instantly feel like I've got to do something about it. Often I'll be in a room and enjoying the music without physically reacting, and I've gotta remind myself of this when playing out, instead of getting hacked off or defensive. As for comedy, are there examples of "ambient comedy"? Blue Jam I guess... Not quite the same thing. But then this applies to all forms of spoken word, from television shows to audiobooks - I get hacked off with TVs being on "in the background". This is why I treasure music as an artform so much - no matter what happens, you are a participant when music is playing. You can choose to ignore it, but you still have to listen to it unless you leave the room. With visual and spoken arts, you can tune out completely - turn the speech into hubbub, turn away from the picture. So technically, with music, you have to react in some way - and you're listening to the same thing as everyone else, regardless if you process it differently.

xp

seeing it in the cinema with a group of strangers would be very different i'm sure. there's also the fact that i came to it as a confirmed Pasolini lover very much aware of the film's status. that's all distancing i think.

xpost actually I generally despise the idea of "background music" unless I'm trying to go to sleep and just want something to drown out background noise. So there ya go.

This is interesting. Whenever I'm DJing and no one seems to be dancing, I instantly feel like I've got to do something about it. Often I'll be in a room and enjoying the music without physically reacting, and I've gotta remind myself of this when playing out, instead of getting hacked off or defensive.

Yeah. You always have to remember that the problem solves itself once everyone's had another drink or three. (Which is true of comedy too, except by the time the crowd is truly warmed up all the opening acts have long since slunk off stage)

reading an article about unamuno and there's a quote that made me think of this thread, which i will now badly translate:
ya sé que a nadie se tuesta, ya no se hacen autos de fe, pero se hace algo peor: combatir las ideas con la burla

"i know that they don't burn anyone, they no longer do autos de fe, but they do something worse: combat ideas with mockery."

he did write that over 100 years ago mind you.

I generally despise the idea of "background music" unless I'm trying to go to sleep and just want something to drown out background noise. So there ya go.

― Alexandre Dumbass (dog latin)

Feel the opposite about this - I don't make a differentiation between foreground and background music, its like listening or not-listening, they often merge

Or walking round a city, looking and not-looking, often the best parts are when non-looking then suddenly realizing, rather than explicitly looking

zoning in, zoning out

yes exactly. the original point of ambient music too, not to be ignored but to reward shifting attention.

"i know that they don't burn anyone, they no longer do autos de fe, but they do something worse: combat ideas with mockery."

I guess the trad UK hostility to pretentiousness, love for 'common sense' maps to this. Can't think or write at the moment (have to shout at Melvyn Bragg on the TV), but I'll try to make a thinking-to-myself post tomorrow if brain is clear, something about Shaftesbury and ridicule maybe.

Dublin blather is the stuff I find funniest in Ulysses.

Having mentioned W Lewis upthread, should have remembered this sooner:

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/jpegs/1143209920265639.jpg

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/jpegs/1143210017640638.jpg

Magnificent.

what charming fascists, those Vorticists

That's probably a whole other thread!

im not sure i understand this thread but i guess i am part of the problem here

I think part of the problem is that NV was "begging the question" a bit.

Banter is not humour; banter is what people have when they lack a sense of humour. Banter is a catch-all word for idiocy that warns the rest of us that Here Be Lads. Banter is Soccer AM. It is Andy Gray. It is middle-aged men on Top Gear pretending that they are edgy outsiders by mocking society's weakest, then going home to Chipping Norton where they live two doors down from the Prime Minister. It is an English stag do in Dublin or Amsterdam with matching T-shirts. It is cruelty unleavened by wit but which is excused because it is a bit like wit, if you look at it from a certain angle. It what is left when humour has died, and just the rotting, stinking carcass remains, bearing a resemblance to the living being but lacking all that made it good. Banter is the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large. If you like banter, you are an idiot.

I have just written a tirade complaining about the price of stadium gig tickets, and now I'm agreeing with an Op/Ed column in the freaking TORYGRAPH.

Today is the day that i finally achieved Old Man Waving Can At Clouds status and there is nothing I can do about it.

Cane.

Though, being me, waving a copy of Ege Bamyasi at the clouds would be just as likely.

Didn't Eva Wiseman write (more or less) the same thing in the Observer a few weeks ago?

the banter backlash has been under way for a while i think, but there are...class dimensions that need to be unpicked.

but banter is only part of what NV was talking about.

Oh, I could say something about the class dimensions of the Bullingdon Banterers and the sheer depths of their sexism once you scratch the surface of their paternalism, but I won't go there.

the banter backlash has been under way for a while i think, but there are...class dimensions that need to be unpicked.

Don't think so, you see it among posh boys as much as working class lads. It's a particularly male thing though.

Tend to see it as 'posh lads' tbh.

surely Barney Ronay did this backlash (not that fascinatingly but he did it)

come to think of it I think Harry Pearson weighed in also

though 'weighed' is not the word for light comic floater HP

"BANTA" has become a Thing amongst footballers and football fans in recent times. Not many posh lads there.

actually HP strikes me as another case of humour not being tyrannical -- his Guardian column is pure humour, not really serious at all, just play, and has often been the best thing in the sport section

yeah banter is def a homosocial thing throughout all classes, thinking about it

I would argue that Matt is right, there aren't class distinctions that need to be unpicked - there are *intellectual* dimensions that need to be unpicked. The intellectual people (though mostly men) of all classes are capable of true wit, the less intellectual are not and so need to fill the chasm where the wit should be with their banter.

The only reason why it seems to be posh lads is because the posh lads are more visible as they have the more visible jobs - you read their words in magazines and hear them on TV. Obviously if you are a painter and decorator and the only place your banter is heard is down your local on a Saturday night people aren't going to be so aware of it.

I should add here (before someone shouts at me) that what I meant wasn't that women aren't capable of wit, it's that women's humour whoever they are is less cruel, so the differences between the humour of intellectual women and non-intellectual women are not so obvious.

Um. I don't know that it's that women's humour is less *cruel* - you've never heard two women giving ~female cleb X~ a once-over? But it seems somehow less competitive, and less based on sexually humiliating the person one is being humourous *with*? Actually, I don't even know that that's true, either. It's just a different power dynamic.

I have wondered why, for a long time, why, when women do sexually loaded "banter" about men, it tends to be a lot funnier and less "offensive" to me than men doing the same thing. If this is just my inherent prejudice, or if there is something in the power dynamic that renders it subversive rather than just grotesque.

But this is another topic. I hate this reductive "men drive like this, women drive like that" stereotypes, they wind me up so much.

Hm, by posh lads, I meant young upper class men taking on the darts/footy/zoo manner, for what psychological or social reason is a different matter.

That thing about intellectual 'wit' and lower class 'banter' I'm not sure is the case either. Certainly there is enough wit, wryness, sardonic and deprecating understatement in all classes, in fact put in those terms it's often seen to be located in working class undermining of authority and upper class attitudes.

Banter seems to be more of conversational froth, tending nowhere and to nothing. At its best banter is light-hearted back-and-forth between friends, usually based on certain cliches about each other's behaviour and known areas of mild difference. It can grease the wheels of conversation, true, although I tend to find it tedious. Humour is often a component, but doesn't need to be, because the main thing is the light-heartedness.

At its worst it's become a noisy badge of 'lads together', the 'just a bit of fun' crowd (and little else, and 'just a bit' is about right).

I have never experienced any humour, with a man, based on him trying to sexually humiliate me.

That would be strange.

Fizzles, the distinction being made was surely clever wit vs dumb banter, in all classes

and in light of WCC's post, the 'lads together' thing shd be extended to it being a defensive/aggressive badge of belonging no matter what the group. Humour or wit isn't limited to that group. xpost

Sorry, you're correct, pinefox. But I probably wouldn't have used the term 'intellectual' I think.

Argh, that was clumsily constructed. Being funny with? Being funny *at*? Like, the objects of "banter", it is definitely about the humiliation of the object. But I suppose the point is bonding with a man in a homosocial way, over the humiliation of the Other, where the Other usually = "women" or other targets of that kind of oneupmanship.

I think people, together, sometimes like laughing at other people, who are not there, or whom maybe they don't like that much

In my own particular experience, that does not have any gendered dimension, eg there is no particular tendency to laugh at women more than men, or to laugh at either on any sexual basis - this sounds likely to be vulgar and not so nice.

Pinefox, you live in such a lovely dream world, I wish I lived in that world, too.

But laughing at people who are not there or who are not part of the bantering group or The Other isn't what I would consider banter? In my experience, banter is between people of similar social standing, is to the face, and there's an implied light-heartedness to it. The expected response is an equally light-hearted ( but superficially cruel) insult straight back, not hand-wringing about how "my friends and colleagues don't like me"...

obvs there are problems where there are big differences in power/ privilege levels or where an equal response wouldn't be tolerated ( add your own examples here ) but that's no longer truly banter, its bullying / harassment etc

When you are bantering across a power gradient of something like gender or race or class, where the Privileged Person believes that there *is* no power structure and sexism or racism etc. is "a solved problem" and no longer really an issue, therefore just available for the humour box - while the other person is someone for whom structural racism or sexism is a real thing that exists and affects their lives in material ways on a regular basis. This is hugely problematic.

Also, in cases where it's perfectly *obvious* even to the privileged person that said structures exist, and they are doing it specifically to be bullying, but with the "hey but it's just banter, what's the matter, haven't you got a sense of humour?"

I'm getting so tired of saying this in a hundred different ways, though.

I would argue that Matt is right, there aren't class distinctions that need to be unpicked - there are *intellectual* dimensions that need to be unpicked. The intellectual people (though mostly men) of all classes are capable of true wit, the less intellectual are not and so need to fill the chasm where the wit should be with their banter.

Don't think so, I've met lots of very intelligent people who are completely witless and/or bludgeoningly and unthinkingly offensive, as well as people who would never trouble the inside of any academic institution who are regularly hilarious. This is the sort of reaching that lefties do when they try and convince themselves that people are right-wing because they're *less intelligent*. The dividing line isn't intelligence or intellectual capacity at all, it's emotional/social awareness and empathy.

^^ otm

wit shows intelligence

I think

It shows a kind of intelligence, but not really one confined to "the intellectual people of all classes".

I think 'intellectual' may have been meant to mean 'people with wit, ie a certain intelligence'? rather than people who read a lot or anything

sounds like 'bantering across a power gradient' means 'openly mocking people less privileged than you, to their faces'

I don't think I know anyone who does this

in my opinion 'banter' is more about perceptions of masculinity and sexuality rather than class or intelligence.

y'know, "it was only banter" is a good enough reason to ban "banter"
I do think a little competitive teasing between consenting adults can be fun though.

It's such a surprise that a straight white male doesn't know anyone who ever bullies anyone, isn't it?

And on the whole "consenting" part, fair enough, but I'm really sick of, well, straight white males getting to define who consents and who doesn't.

Oh god this thread just makes me unhappy and I should stay the fuck off it, it's not good for me to engage with this stuff.

What are the working definitions of "wit" and "banter" here, please? I mean, typically you hear the two words together as the phrase "witty banter" to describe Buffy or Gilmore Girls or something.

xp to wcc

ah, sorry it makes you unhappy - not the intention at all!

re consent : don't you think consent and trust can exist, and within those boundaries the rules of acceptable behaviour can (not should, but can) change?

I would hate to think that my wife and I shouldn't affectionately tease each other! (and in that context "you lazy bastard" can mean "I love you" given the right tone and non-verbals)

you're onto something tho, WCC, even if it isn't where i started the thread from.

the salon savagery of something like les liasons dangereuses is a part of banter, but the school classroom hooting and bullying of the sacrificial victim is another pole of it. some people will excuse one because it's "witty" and yet the intention in both cases is to wound, socially or emotionally. there's another kind of banter which is of the "friends and equals engaged in horseplay" variety i guess. the problem is the same word applied indiscriminately to different activities. and the word becoming an excuse for those who want to engage in the savagery but pretend oh so disingenuously that what they're doing is playful.

my notions of "public humour" don't really impact on this, which is older and darker maybe.

"Banter" doesn't always have to be oppressive. It can also be used for bonding - friends teasing each other - totally consensual and not directed negatively against anyone who isn't involved in it.

"you lazy bastard" can mean "I love you"

Now, this *is* interesting coz there is def a nationality component here. In terms of using insults affectionately, which may be considered "teasing" by some, it is more common and more commonly accepted in Australia, than the UK, and more common and more commonly accepted in the UK than the US.

I'm mindful of this quote from "Bodyline" now.

Although it can be when it is used in the sense "it's only banter - can't you take a joke". It's a word that can be used in lots of different ways

xp to myself

To take a specific example, The Tyranny of Humour, wrt banter, was very much a part of the power/privilege style bullying at a supermarket I worked in. Laughter or even 'light-heartedness' can also be directed at people, trivialising things they take seriously or are important to them. Further that banter/light-hearted back and forth can be withheld in a very tangible way from people who you do not wish to include.

This sort of behaviour was the preserve of bosses and longer-term people, and often used at the expense of people who didn't quite fit in or were new. The fact that it isn't quite bullying as such, doesn't mean that its effect is not the same.

This happens everywhere all the time, of course, but this seemed a particular tangible and exemplary version of how banter can work, often works in fact. The laughter of humour generally should, ideally perhaps, be seen as inclusive, as 'funny' beyond the immediate group and thus making people laugh who are not part of that group. Not sure it quite ever works like that, but 'banter' certainly doesn't work like that.

Recognising that you have established consent for banter with your wife is v v different from the kinds of places where these forms of harmful "banter" are used.

One does not have consent for this kind of banter in the workplace, with strangers on internet forums, in public newspapers, on the air of radio and television.

Conflating the two is really kind of disingenuous because "I like bantering with my wife" is not really what we're talking about.

"strangers on internet forums" is pretty problematic, without condoning obvious bullying. a lot of us here are strangers in one sense but feel a degree of familiarity with each others personae as well

*can't you take a joke* nearly always comes across as "it's my right to be derogatory to you and have you not mind" though.

there is the closely related *can dish it out but can't take it* where the person who had been accused of *not taking a joke* then makes a similar comment at the original "joker"'s expense only for the "joker" to be hurt by it.

i dunno "dish it out but can't take it" has broader applications than that

xxp
Hi WCC, No i'm not conflating the two. you responded to my note that consenting adults can tease each other competitively by ( i think) querying the concept of consent - I gave you a personal example of where consent is truly shared. {implicitly I hope recognising and agreeing that consent is often not shared}

Re. "harmful banter", I agree with you ! But I also wanted to recognise that there are areas where playful insults may be acceptable and fun.

there's another kind of banter which is of the "friends and equals engaged in horseplay" variety i guess.

the problem with this kind of banter is that, even when there aren't any power relations involved, it can be so rigorously enforced that anyone in that social circle or who comes into contact with that social circle will feel as though they have no choice but to conform to banter culture - which as previously noted is often based around mutually cruel put-downs and "pushing the boundaries" (and i think may have some unspoken roots in the idea of "toughening you up").

as i said only one subset of my own friends act in that way, and i actually sorta like it but only cuz i've known them for ages (so i know it genuinely "doesn't mean anything"), i see them v rarely (wouldn't want to be around that as a matter of course) and i'm not exposed to it at any other time.

pretty sure banter by the dictionary definition is ok with me. but the word has taken on some new meaning in the context of Lad culture e.g. lewd discussion of shagging, football, rugby, drinking etc. probably men have been discussing these things forever but it's become the enforced mode of communication for those that self-identify as Lads. i'm not sure all Banter is necessarily about offending the other, sometimes it can be quite self-deprecating too.

Would be interested in hearing the opinions of any literary theory types who could link banter to Bakhtin's theories of the Carnivalesque

"Roll up, Roll up you skinny indie twots and come inside!!"

http://i.imgur.com/dYc0c.jpg

"banter" in the 18th century was something quite different and much closer to "the argot of criminals and dregs" so there's at least a history of them and us entwined into the word

agree with Lex that any social group that communicates exclusively thru banter wd get very boring very quickly

Is this thread about why we banned Dom?

you are so weirdly stuck on him

nowt to do with banter, or Dom, but just remembered that the chaplain at my 6th form college used to be very keen on humour - which he defined as " the affectionate communication of insight" . not sure where he got that from, but I do rather like it.

Banter isn't the most advanced form of humour, no, but there is a difference between friendly goading among two people who know each other well and full on bullying/chiding - it's all case-by-case innit? ILX has its own "zing" culture that ranges between genuine wit and outright nastiness, but it's pretty much impossible trying to deconstruct this. When a bit of verbl rough-n-tumble spills over into malice/tedium, that's really up to the parties involved to decide.

Amazing Fugazi moment that I can't remember if it was actually in the Instrument film or just at a show I attended:

Guy in audience: "Banter!"
Ian MacKaye: "Banter? What kind of banter would you like SIR? Am I bantering enough for you now?"

how does "banter" work in England? your version sounds so mean.

banter is the many against the one (the many aren't required to be present at the time)

it is the form exclusion takes

it is used to reinforce the boundaries of who is inside and who is outside

those that are outside are required to play along in order that everyone can pretend for a joke that they are inside

to refuse the rules of the game is to let the whole of society down

how does "banter" work in England? your version sounds so mean.

― beachville, Wednesday, March 7, 2012

It is how we consolidate hierarchies

and reinforce status quo

Banaka?

no she went of her own volition

I am having trouble with this again.

This is a personal example, so I'm afraid it might come across as "wah, oh woe is me" when it's actually me adding another piece to the puzzle of why I find it so difficult and overwhelming and unhappy-making.

Recognising and responding to humour is really really hard work for me, reading "tone" and responding in the correct "tone" is a constant battle. I've always used the metaphor of trying to follow the steps of a complicated 19th century dance without knowing the steps - and indeed, without even being able to hear the music.

Someone responded to a nuanced discussion with a rather pointed - and to my eyes - rude dismissal. I kind of sat looking at it for about five minutes, trying to work out, do they mean this? Is it as rude and mean as it looks? Are they being "funny"? Is this "banter"? After about five minutes, I decided it was "banter" and responded in (what I thought was) exactly the same tone - pointed and slightly mean, but with a hook I thought was funny.

Hey, look at me, I'm doing "banter."

They responded back with an absolute shit-storm, accused me of "lashing out" and told me to "chill out" (erm, I've been perhaps too calm in my evaluation of this whole thing?) and when I tried to say this was hypocritical, asking why responding in exactly the same manner was somehow "banter" for them and "lashing out" for me - they pitched an absolute fit, accusing me of "drama" when what I'm thinking is "whoa, where did this come from, can you dish it out, but you can't take it" ?

This is when I just want to give up and move to Mars, because I'm hurt and confused by their reaction (both times - first in them doing the banter, second in their having such a terrible reaction to *my* banter) and they're (I think?) acting like they're hurt and confused by my actions.

And I just feel like... why the *fuck* would you put someone through this kind of ordeal, and call it "humour."

Do I have no sense of humour? Am I just an aspie shut-in who should stop trying to interact with other people because I can neither read nor properly react to "tone"? Have I just been bullied into a kind of defensiveness that perpetually reads as aggressive even when I'm not?

Don't bother answering those questions, I'm not asking for advice. I'm just trying to state, very inarticulately, how hard it is for someone to deal with, and react to, what other people claim is "just banter." And why someone like me will avoid "banter" like the plague.

People who insist on forcing "banter" on you, and then getting angry at you about your reactions, basically: MASSIVE FUCKING DUD.

Sounds like a pian. I guess the answer as with most things is just to be yourself, if you're not comfortable with banter, just answer with a straight reply. It's their problem if they find that annoying.

er *pain*

The word "banter" often reminds me of the phrase "bantha fodder" from Star Wars

I was at a dinner party the other night where none of the couples/singles knew any of the others, and the title of this thread popped into my head

There is a kind of arms race of clever-clever oneupmanship that can happen, and which is incredibly offputting if you're not part of the circle that understands it, or not on cocaine/drunk, and I think it's reaaallly exacerbated when people don't really know each other

It's especially bad when you have more than one (usually male) person in the room who is used to thinking of himself as the funny man.

I guess the moral of the story is: if you feel uncomfortable with something, don't do it.

But I have been reading post's posts above, and thinking about the way that banter is used for the construction of insider and outsider identities. And how that is such a double-edged sword.

I might have got the tone wrong, maybe they were using the banter to include me, maybe it was a "newbies GTFO" banter aimed at excluding me? I don't know. IDGI. I can't ever seem to read it.

My problem is not that I can't "read" humour because I'm too literal, but because my mind is sorting through so many different layers of meaning before I can reach the correct level of whether it's *humour* or not, which seems to happen even before I can get around to reacting to whether it's funny or not.. There are just too many options, is this banter constructing me on the inside? Or on the outside?

We got into trouble with this on the Radiohead thread last week, where... it's one thing when Melissa and I make "LOL fangirls" jokes back and forth at one another, because in the construction of identity, we are both assigning ourselves to the same class, we are Radiohead fangirls, we are laughing with each other, not at each other, when we pick on the denigrated class of "fangirl." We've taken the "outsider" category and made a joke over us both being insiders. But when Mark G or AG comes in and makes *exactly the same* "LOL fangirls" joke, it has such a different context, because they're not fangirls, so they may think that they are making the same jokes, but the context is so different in that they are not in the category, therefore they are pushing us back to the status of outsider again, with the same words. Which is not funny, it's unpleasant.

This is why I find humour so difficult, because it's so fucking complicated. It must be so much easier to understand humour when you don't have to deal with - or even think about - those insider/outsider categories.

(Then it just comes back around to the whole "OMG, you're being so ~disingenuous~ with your confusion, how can you not understand (which of the 500 different levels I meant to be funny on)!?!?")

We had dinner last night with friends of ours who are a MF couple. The dude is Scottish; bouncing jokes off of each other was an interesting experience just because both the idioms and the spoken cadence between my midwest US accent and his accent (btw I don't know Scottish accents well enough to place beyond "understandable" and "are we speaking the same language?"). There were multiple times where he made jokes that I hadn't realized were complete thoughts because his spoken inflection led me to think he was going to say something more and I'd have to go back and run back what he said in my head to realize he'd expressed a complete thought.

This was a lot of work for a conversation that was operating on the level of describing the giant maxipad they found on the sidewalk earlier that day and coming up with porn titles for Indiana Jones movies.

some people find tone and intent incredibly difficult to read even in face to face conversations. in print, the difficulties are exacerbated, with none of the physical clues of face to face - no tone of voice, no facial clues, no body language.

for all that emoticons can be cloying or twee or overused i think they survive because they're a useful attempt to put some of this paralanguage back into written communication. but of course, like any paralanguage, they're also open to difficulties of interpretation.

which isn't to say these difficulties are solely the fault or the problem of the interpreter - they're equally problematic if the person trying to communicate isn't saying what they "mean" to say.

Cross-cultural humour is bloody difficult, no matter what the context (doubly so if they're Weejans.) I guess take that conversation and replay it for 40 years, and that's basically part of my trouble with humour.

Like Tracer's description of a cleverness "arms race", it is another kind of status jostling to establish who is going to be "the funny one" in a newly assembled group.

some people find tone and intent incredibly difficult to read even in face to face conversations. in print, the difficulties are exacerbated, with none of the physical clues of face to face - no tone of voice, no facial clues, no body language.

OMG, yes, this, times 1000. It's why I hate talking on the phone so much. I suppose I love text because it strips away a lot of the distractions (I am so distracted all the time, by tone and affect) but it really doesn't help with the humour thing.

My wife (who is a private person, so..)..

... makes/d self-deprecating humour jokes, people laugh, and that's fine.

Some make the mistake of thinking aha and join in with the 'you are thick also because' and that's not fine.

There's only one way to avoid this: Don't put yourself down.

Now, that's one scenario. Others work differently.

i think text can be as flexible a means of conveying meaning as any, but any time you get into saying something you don't mean you are deliberately introducing a problem into your communication. sometimes that difficulty isn't intended to exclude. but i'm now wondering what rhetorical ends irony in its literary sense serves. and then obviously why/if irony has become such a widely-used strategy in public discourse.

people have talked about non-directional irony upthread, and how it protects the user from fully committing to an idea so as not to appear stupid if somebody argues against. but there's more to it i think. an absence of belief as well as a disguise? as if perma-irony becomes a way of avoiding communication yourself because there's some lack of social understanding inside the ironist?

so many of the things i laugh at are bound up in tone and also my knowledge of the person speaking - went for brunch on sun and spent most of my time cracking up but nothing anyone was saying would be recognisable as a "joke" per se.

which might be why my reaction to ubiquitous (and impersonal) "internet humour" and memes is a heavily disapproving kmt.

on the other hand, often i work with people who are supposed to have huge difficulty understanding tone or other kinds of paralanguage - i've got reservations about that idea but nevertheless - and none of them are "humourless".

But that ubiquitous and impersonal "internet humour" of memes is a way of easing humour discourse without a shared culture and history - or a way of creating a new one that anyone on the internet can participate in.

x-post

Interesting thought. I wonder if earlier (pre-Victorian) English writing attempted to convey the pragmatics/emotion with more discursive, idiomatic,symbolically coded language that was phased out during the 1800s w/ the efficiency and formalization of writing conventions & if emoticons and script markup are an attempt to reinsert the piece of communication that is largely unconcerned with "meaning"

I'm trying to get my head around what NV is saying about irony. And thinking, perhaps this is part of my problem with "Irony" as distancing technique. That I'm already sorting through 100 different possible meanings, when you introduce irony and "opposite-land talk" the person using it is literally (ha) doubling my job.

I dunno; I don't think I'm humourless. The world is often very, very funny. Of course it is. It's just that the things that people do to construct "humour" are so complicated and difficult for me to get my head around what they *mean*.

i think part of what i'm saying is that if you right a novel featuring ironic language there is a structure which clues the reader towards the irony - it's gettable. on a message board where although we're writing we're mostly imitating the style and rhythm of speech, the structures don't allow for making irony obvious - failure to grasp that a post is ironic is generally the poster's fault rather than the readers.

if you write a novel, even

In the sense that all communication is an arbitration for meaning, introducing the notion of dissembling/disingenuousness for "benign" purposes - e.g. sarcasm, irony - can (to me) be funny because it piles meaning on meaning on meaning and complicates the language in a way that values the playful over the actual.

It's not just about that poster's fault, it's about familiarity - with that person or group (and their familiarity with you.)

well yeah i'm not saying it wd be better if people never used irony. i am saying they have no right to get exasperated if somebody fails to recognise it.

(unless they've used a shitload of italics and ;-) winky symbols)

and also that there are places where we have a right to expect there to not be irony - on the labelling of overpriced soft drinks for example

I suppose that's my exasperation in this specific example - that I correctly realised, without any italics or winkies or indeed any visual cues - that someone was attempting humour - and yet they were not willing to allow me the same latitude.

(Sorry, I'll stop moaning and derailing, I'm just trying to sort through some disproportionate hurt here, and figure out why I was so upset by this thing.)

it's not a derail it's a scenic diversion

i would be upset if i felt like people were miscontruing what i said in a judgemental fashion too

I think whenever you try to be funny in a way that's not "you", it's not funny (and when that way includes being a little bit mean, then you've got a potentially combustible situation)

(As someone whose partner's first language isn't English I know whereof I speak here)

The thing is, it is a thing that's very, *very* me, but it's something I recognise as harmful and dangerous, and therefore I try to divert that kind of super-cutting humour into, e.g. song lyrics, because I recognise that humour can be a weapon, and how to use it, and how to *hurt* someone using it. That my caustic side is something I don't like - and I'm not afraid that it's out of character, I'm afraid that it's rather too much *in* character. That I have the potential to be very cruel, and much of my avoiding humour (and thus potentially coming across as humourless) is actually about avoiding cruelty, which I despise, because I have such a potential for it.

(Also, a person who thinks of themselves as caustic, might have been caught out, being out-causticked by the new person.)

Oh OK! Your post where you described the exchange made it sound like you were sort of blindly trying out this "banter" thing and hoping it "worked"

I also suspect your initial shock and hurt at the other person's message to you may have, shall we say, amped up the barb-itude of your rejoinder whether you were aware of it or not..

Well, I was, but I got the tone wrong? I don't know. That's what I'm trying to work out.

I am very very afraid of my capacity for cruelty. That's why I don't do banter, because it's very easy for me to get the tone wrong.

Maybe you're v. empathetic as well? I tend to avoid banter IRL b/c I'm so hyper-aware of how it lands on the recipient that it's kind of a conversational paralytic.

i think that's actually quite a common thing, to try one's hand at that sort of banter and only realise too late you've crashed right over the line (or get paranoid you crossed the line, only to find out no one noticed). i've certainly done it!

The thing is, that most people who crash over the line don't even realise they've done it, and just keep up with the "you can't handle my banter, maaaan" line.

That that terror of ~doing it wrong~ and offending the other person for real is probably a good thing.

i mean, that's why it's a bonding tactic, cuz it's actually a way of reaffirming one's closeness to one's friends - like, if the assumption is that you genuinely care about this person, they'll know you don't "mean it" when you take the piss out of them - they know you don't actually think badly of them. of course this is a massively double-edged thing b/c it's easy to end up in a relationship which is so predicated on this sort of cruel humour that it gets a bit unhealthy and genuinely damaging.

That's the thing, though. I never know when other people are doing it to be affectionate, I find it v v difficult. Because I live in a world where people I thought loved me do suddenly just up and change their minds and decide that they hate me the next, and the sort of things that people say in banter, they are the sort of things that "former friends" eventually do come out with one day. The fear that that "banter" is what they have *really* been thinking all along.

God, I'm neurotic, I'm sorry, I shouldn't bring this sort of stuff up.

This has opened a trapdoor I didn't really need to open today.

The thing is, that most people who crash over the line don't even realise they've done it, and just keep up with the "you can't handle my banter, maaaan" line.

i don't think this is actually true if it's kept within close friendships (ime, anyway) - this happens when, as you say, it's a means of reaffirming insiderness vs outsiderness.

in a close friendship it's almost like the point is to test the boundaries. eg, some people i meet up with occasionally, inc two dudes who have been v good friends for years and years - i was catching up, asking one of them why he'd come back to the UK, it turned out he was gonna marry his fiancée...but she dumped him. and his friend was kind of jokingly taking the piss out of that, it was quite weird but seemed quite natural for them.

adrian chiles & roy keane = tyranny of humour vs humour of tyranny

chiles is 'insouciant' 'irreverent' and all that shite, never not facetious

this compulsive funniness is really getting on my nerves lately in the office. it's like EVERYONE is the "joke guy" now. You can't actually complete a coherent thought without a hamfisted, awkwardly dropped laugline from someone.

Hate it when that happens. Also hate it when you hear about some guy long before you meet him, about how hilarious he is and then he turns out to be one of those guys.

Funny is better than not funny, regardless of haters

Yeah but 'funny' != funny.

cf Goodfellas

Funny > Not funny but keeps it to self >>>>> Not funny but trying to be

yeah, that.

this thread gives me nightmares

pat funn

>>>>>>>>>>> being forever serious

i keep meaning to come back to this, feel it more than ever all around the place, don't know if this is the sourness of middle age or if the whole culture is in its end of civ death throes coming out as perpetual frivolity

humour

this is a really good thread NV. i remember it from when i was a lurker. i am of two minds about this: humor is central to how i communicate, but i think that i use it to establish "distance" from people at least as much as i do to "connect" with them. in terms of art, there is plenty of stuff i love that is devoid of humor -- i think the earnestness of "in the aeroplane over the sea" was super risky, bordering on brave, and the films of terrence malick don't seem especially humorous to me -- but my favorite works of art, the ones i feel closest to, are almost invariably funny ones (ulysses, the short stories of gogol, bob dylan's music, even the jazz i like best has a "lightness" to it that corresponds to humor, and my favorite jazz records are mingus ones with crazy, satirical titles.)

i think humor makes people feel safe because it is a way to communicate indirectly, to say things without exposing how one "really" feels, or if one does communicate honestly, it gives them an out. maybe people, in general, don't really want to connect on a truly intimate level?

these are all just loosely sketched thoughts.

thought for sure this thread was revived because of http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?showall=true&bookmarkedmessageid=4300963&boardid=77&threadid=67478

i think that link doesn't work, it just takes me to the site homepage

you're absolutely right. moving on

It's a link to 77

xp oh shi

i don't understand

but that's ok

77 is the invite-only board that only those invited can see.

keep meaning to come back to this, feel it more than ever all around the place, don't know if this is the sourness of middle age or if the whole culture is in its end of civ death throes coming out as perpetual frivolity

― we're up all night to get relegated (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, May 1, 2013 5:17 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think also as you get older an increasing amount of humor comes to seem familiar and tired, like there are a limited number of forms and types of jokey comments a person can make, and more and more of them come to seem obvious and cliched with experience.

Damn I didnt know their was a shadow world of the ilx elite

You need Vic Serotonin to give you a tour of the Saudade Event site.

Yeah see I don't understand what any of that is. Feel scared, like maybe this is a cult that lures people in with the promise of impassioned yet fairminded debates about pop music.

Nobody promised fairminded

ilx is really into puns

You need Vic Serotonin to give you a tour of the Saudade Event site.

:)

though i kind of hate all his "presenting" shit

Treeship, if you have ever seen the old BBC series The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan, then you will have a fair idea of life in the ilx commune. 77 is just a place where the all-powerful ilx Guardians can go to relax and have a gin and tonic before resuming their onerous duties.

crambs

hm... that board seems awesome. i think i am going to have dreams about it.

cramps
Don't pick it up

Oops. Completely messed up the execution of a dumb joke that probably only made sense to me and even then only barely. Ah Humour, Ah The Tyranny!

the more cryptic the pun, the more impressive, as it makes the people who don't get it feel embarrassed. that's what humor's all about

I believe that is a particular sub genre of humor, the screen name, or more precisely, the rejected screen name.

today i went to the local bagel shop and some gross dudes out front were making lewd comments about all the women who walked past. i didn't understand all of the things they were saying, which made me feel like i was in middle school all over again.. left out of an adult conversation. it wasn't a great feeling, but then i realized that i didn't really want to know what they were saying, and felt better.

77 is the invite-only board that only those invited can see.

just want to point out that this is wrong. you have to ASK for an invite. it's de-indexed from google, so it's not open unless you ask to access it. there's a thread dedicating to asking for access.

how seasoned/accomplished a poster do you need to be before it is appropriate to ask for an invite?

level 5

the tyranny of invisible levels

Exclusive pic of an ilx moderator unwinding in the 77 board's member's only lounge:

http://buildaclubhouse.com/images/cushion-clubhouse.jpeg

hate to ruin the mystique but it's not like at some point you get a private message saying "you have been chosen, prepare to witness and perhaps even contribute to the greatest threads of all time". it's more like if you want to look in there, you'll get to see (even more of) me talking about sweaty balls or whatever.

speaking of the greatest threads of all time, this is a good one. i don't have anything useful to say, but i often think of what it might be like to be born in a different time and location, and instead of spending my days trying to think of semi-humorous ways to refer to a secret borad on the internet because it's awkward to talk about without at least trying to make a joke, maybe i'd be slowly walking on a stone path imagining the many faces of imagined solemn gods with folded hands

for me to poop on

dammit i didn't even do that correctly

can i have an invitation to the stone footpath lined with invisible statues of gods with folded hands?

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=51

Be careful you don't come back in toothpicks, Treeship.

you mean when navigating my treeship to the deepest circle of hell, in a quest to retrieve a secret object that, upon returning it to the board moderators, would grant me access to the coveted Board 77? i'll be careful.

there's a thread dedicating to asking for access.

yeah, i linked to a search that pulls the 77 request thread, but maybe that was too arcane a cloo. point is there's a 77 request thread. i hedged for a long time before asking, but access seems p much unrestricted.

I would like to be on 77 too pls.

― the questeon

77 is the invite-only board that only those invited can see.

just want to point out that this is wrong.

Not really. You need and invite to post, you need an invite to see it - it is not precisely my fault that you've mistaken this for me talking about the board where we hunt the Greatest Game.

ssshhhh!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMcmDTX1JwQ

http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-79-of-sincere-thoughts-played-off-as-jokes,33026/

went to amateur stand-up this evening and it's close to being the worst not-actually-tragic nights of my life.

I've come to the strange realization in recent years that the "tyranny of humour" is actually the tyranny of my own mother, who tends to make an almost constant stream of irrelevant and mostly unfunny "witty" remarks, ruining any normal conversation she takes part in. Well she either ruins it that way or just by slyly shifting the topic to herself in a way that isn't really within the scope of the original conversation.

false laughter and faked emotions exist without time

thats sad u guys should go to a therapist. it's horrible to have "grating" relaionship with loved ones. i used to feel like the above statement re: my mother, self, etc. ican't wait to get to a therapist. my entire family is resolutely mad.

yes, "grating" is the word for it. The real reason it's irritating is that it belies a certain amount of obliviousness to the feelings and interests of other people, which I would guess most people find at worst mildly annoying or at best even charming, but it's depressing for a son.

Take it easy Hurting, she's not going to be there forever and nobody is perfect. Look at the big picture.

I hope you realize, Hurting, that by posting about this issue on an intranetz message borad what you are asking for is some tough love.

holiday confessional ilxing

irony is pretty much our primary tool as a feeling species and eventually when all of us who grew up in the 1990s are finally dead people will remember that the word doesn't mean "making fun of stuff" but refers to an attunement to the failure of expectations that is at root deeply humble, and that since probability and not physics is on some level the mother of the sciences lacking or failing to develop this sense is like never understanding that objects move when you push them, i.e., you won't ever have any idea what's going on

― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour)

booming post tho

most difficult listening hour posts are booming posts

separate thread for 'laughing fits at funerals: what are the protocols?' or can we do that here too

original thought leading to current DN: "the arid banter of Rob Brydon"

twat

well I asked him about you and he says you're lovely, so

even our Hannah joeks about how bad that Blankety Blank rip-off is

Remind me again was part of the basis of this thread a few usuals claiming to be threatened by ppl with senses of humour within normal range or was there more to it (all dues to NV who is often the thoughtful vehicle too much obliging of some deeply questionable passengers imo)

To be clear I feel it wasn't but I do reset to that view in my head, iirc there was a decent discussion of this for a while.

Did, obv, we ever get it sorted? Good to get it up on the FAQ

i think u can just like read the thread?

:O

Feel tyrannised

Gershy never had to put up with this shit I'm sayin

Started with me wondering why kids couldn't just blog about their art projects without trying to work a stand-up routine in there iirc

I remember really agreeing with this thread when you posted it. Yet now I live somewhere that no one understands my dialect, and i can't be casually jokey in a natural way, and i feel like im fundamentally unable to express myself

yeah i'm probably tyrannically "funny guy" myself quite often when talking to people but here's the thing, when i catch myself doing it sometimes it feels like i'm performing rather than sincerely one to one communicating and that i think is the tyranny of every fucker wants to be Jimmy Carr

I think being "funny guy" isn't just about self-serving performance - and if showboating can make you feel better about yourself sometimes, there's nothing wrong with that - just as long as you understand when to turn it off. I work in a pretty emotionally demanding office - from the level of bureaucracy and bad managerial behaviour, to the nature of the work itself (helping child refugees). When life is tense, humour - even of the showboating variety, although preferably not - can put people at ease and designate places as safe spaces, where people can speak more freely.

(i.e. a good joke can free up a room of people to talk more honestly, rather than just create a circle jerk of one-upping banter)

article starts interesting and then talks about amy schumer, the ostensible reason for it, and then gets boring fast: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/knock-yourselves-out-schwartz

I have been working a lot lately on reducing my own use of humor and irony as a social defense, at just being able to take new people as they are, ask them genuine questions about themselves, take interest in them as people and be decent to them. It's partly a necessity of the awkwardness of being in this totally new social situation where people I never would have been friends with before are now my scene, being "dads" and living in the neighborhood. It's also a matter of overcoming personal insecurities and realizing that there's no reason to expect people to have some kind of natural dislike of me if I don't disarm them with humor.

Did, obv, we ever get it sorted?

Otm

"“Punching up” and “punching down” are relatively new pop-political terms, often found not far from words like “mansplaining,” “problematic,” and “trolling.”"
insightful

Problematic for the People

This would have given me a chuckle if it was about Peter Buck making an off-color remark.

Like man alive, I am actively trying not to use humor as a default social pose.

That said, I'm rarely trying to be "funny" in the conventional ha-ha sense, but I _think_ that I think in jokes - they are pretty much how I process the world.

To be more precise, the way I think is heavily dependent on quasi-jokey constructs especially puns and absurd exaggerations.

My mind is very language-based; correspondences between words preoccupy me 24/7. I could no sooner stop seeing anagrams, palindromes, and homonyms than I could stop seeing colors. I saw the word "standoffish" yesterday and went on a long mental expedition where it became "stand of fish," and so there I was imagining a fish-selling stand, and by the time I got back to the sentence in question, I'd lost the original thread of whatever it was I'd been reading. If I see a 2-pack of something in a store, I will reflexively call it a Shakur. It's hard for me to say the word "warmth" without reflecting on how "coolth" isn't its opposite. None of this is really funny or original, it's just how my brain occupies itself.

Sometimes I say stuff like this out loud, and people think I'm trying to be funny - as in, trying to make people laugh / trying to garner attention for myself / trying to be thought original or cute. But it's really not that, it's just that this is the way my mind works and I can't stop it. It is incumbent on me to curtail it.

The absurd exaggeration or completely over-the-top inappropriate suggestion is another tic, one I wish I could turn off. If I'm standing next to a barbecue grill and holding a baby, I'm going to suggest that the baby would be tasty if given a ginger-lime marinade. When I forget where my keys are, I tell my wife that it's time to put me out on the ice floe to die.

Again, none of this is really LOL funny, but it's where my head goes: say the thing that is very much not so, as a means of indicating that I really do love the baby and would absolutely never put her on the grill. Nabokov said something once about how his evilest characters are like gargoyles on the exteriors of cathedrals: they adorn the OUTSIDE, to show that they've been expelled and they're not inside.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coolth

to save you the effort the page lists "Clotho" as an anagram

Yeah I am also a compulsive mental punner. I was just talking with my wife about that the other day, who is completely not one at all to the point that she was actually curious as to how I come up with all my stupid puns.

I have a running joke with my four-year-old, who asks for a granola/kashii bar every morning by saying "can I have my bar now?" And I always respond "what, you want a barn owl?" And we riff on this for a few minutes and it never seems to get old. Or she'll say "Okay, so..." and I'll say "What? Queso?"

I read the punching up piece btw, and even had an exchange with its offer. I didn't much like it, and I hate to be that guy but it's noteworthy that the author and the comedians he quotes complaining about the phrase are white dudes. As I pointed out to him in the exchange, being "funny" should not be the supreme value, and in fact it's super easy to be "funny" by being crass or mean, probably the easiest way to get laughs. That's why they're called "cheap laughs." That's why every shitty nobody stand-up comic you go see in the worst dive clubs relies on bad ethnic stereotypes, women are dumb or annoying, non-punchline punchlines about sex and bodily functions, etc.

when I was small I'd ask my dad for a drink "I'm thirsty" "nice to meet you - I'm friday" he'd always reply eventually I died of dehydration

lol, that reminds me that a co-worker just told me a story about a friend who would do the "put that coffee down, coffee is for closers" bit literally every morning when his wife made coffee. She hated it so much that she started getting up earlier to make coffee, and they eventually divorced.

There is no more noble act than laughing at someone else's suffering. And there's oculus lump difference between impoverished people joking about the rich and rich people joking about the impoverished.

Oculus = obviously, for some reason.

And lump = no. Oh dear, forget it. If dusk snark fish shah me to all of you!

I think the point the article was trying to make was sort of "leave the comedy to the comedians" and that it's these annoying social justicey types coming up with the "punching up/punching down" standard. (1) I doubt that's true (2) I don't give a shit about leaving the comedy to the comedians, fuck comedians

in fact there is no more noble act than laughing at someone else's autocorrect

:(

:)

lol I also seem to have said I had an exchange with the piece's "offer" instead of its "author".

speaking of puns

i stopped being funny entirely a few years ago. it's not that great. i wouldn't recommend it.

There's a good John Cleese interview clip out there somewhere where he basically links ceasing to be funny with giving up and succumbing to a kind of total cynicism about the world, I'm not putting it exactly the way he does, but he basically makes humor out to be something you experience when you are able to believe that people mostly know what they're doing but occasionally there are these anomalies that create humor, but eventually you get old and realize no one has any idea what they're doing at all.

Oh god

Attempting to assess humour by reference to morality is like gauging direction by reference to flavour

If you have to filter humour by agreement with your own personal whatever first then youre a bad person

The punching up/punching down framework works if you view humor simply as a rhetorical tool, but it's really much broader than that. It's an entire dimension of communication. Irony for instance can be used tactfully to "make a point" but it's also just out most naturalized way of minding the gap between language and reality. It's a distancing mechanism.

Laurie Anderson was saying "ethics is the aesthetics of the future" in the 80s, but she also spelled it "few... ture" to imply that this would be so mainly inside a bubble of privilege.

When I studied aesthetics as a young philosophy major (same time frame), we spent a lot of time on humor. The language of punch up/punch down had not yet been invented, but we did speak in terms of inversion of power structures as a source of humor. Interestingly, inversion of power structures was regarded as a subset of surprise. You're surprised to see the duck inside the refrigerator, that's why the joke is funny. You're surprised to see the bum triumphing over the millionaire, that's why those situations are funny. Or so the theory went.

One reason I quit standup comedy (aside from it being very hard and I wasn't particularly good at it, or willing to work at getting better) was what I thought of as "the tyranny of laughter." Unlike other performance types, you really can't argue if most of the audience doesn't laugh, "I was good." There is no evaluative base on which to stand there; success = laughter. (Aside from the expense, I've been to a comedy club 4 or fewer times in the last 20 years bcz I don't enjoy the standup aesthetic.)

There's a good John Cleese interview clip out there somewhere where he basically links ceasing to be funny with giving up and succumbing to a kind of total cynicism about the world

And he would know. Not half, Jesus Christ.

Was too slow off the mark with Oculus Lump I see, dammit.

More re: punching up vs. down.

I think in "comedy" (broadly considered as an institution with implicit "rules" and as an industry that responds to market forces) the battle is largely over. There are holdouts in bunkers still punching down. Here are three suggested flavors:

1. Retro throwbacks, like those Japanese WWII dudes on islands who hadn't gotten word that the Emperor has surrendered.

2. Contrarians who want specifically to play up how "daring" they are, ostentatiously barbecuing a sacred cow specifically in order to be called "daring."

3. Meta-satirists specifically deciding to act as though punching down were still allowed largely to show that know it isn't.

If Rodney Dangerfield or whoever is still out there saying "wow, bitches sure do take a long time to get ready, amirite"? That's type 1. Eddie Murphy's "gay police" routine was seen as risque but allowable in the 80s. Andrew Dice Clay's "There was an old woman who had so many kids HER UTERUS FELL OUT" was seen as raunchy but within the bounds of comedic discourse.

When Anthony Jeselnik says something like "my girlfriend doesn't have pubic hair.... YET" in 2015, he's either in category 2 or 3. I don't know which, and I think he wants you to wonder which one it is.

here is my argument against attempting to be funny on the internet.

it is extremely hard to be funny without being cruel. most of the available targets for making fun of on the internet these days are, well, probably insane. or at the very least deranged. this doesn't mean they're not responsible for their words and actions, but humor is fleeting, and the results of merciless ridicule of profoundly damaged human beings are lasting. which is to say that humor is a very bad way of holding people responsible for their words and actions.

even when someone is fully worthy of all the scorn and contempt you can possibly dish out against them, the larger point of such scorn and contempt, beyond an immediate selfish self-satisfaction, is elusive. let us take, for instance, donald trump. this is someone who is, to the extent that we can judge other human beings, a very, very, very, very bad person. and because of this, we call him "orange". yes, very funny. ha ha. this probably genocidal egotist's skin color is a shade of orange.

possibly it is to stave off the existential depression caused by the knowledge that a good portion of the world's population thinks that the world should be led by either trump or by some local equivalent. but i don't think it's very effective at that, either.

i think it's okay (and occasionally funny) to make fun of donald trump

the best argument against attempting to funny is that most people aren't

sure i don't have a strongly entrenched interest in telling people what to or not to say on the internet unless it involves rape threats, but i kind of feel like i can safely leave that important job up to other people.

most people aren't musicians, either. doesn't mean nobody should take up the guitar.

What's funny about attacking Trump's skin color or hand size is not that he can help it. It's that he's simultaneously a rude asshole, and incredibly thin-skinned. He has utterly no compunction about insulting someone else's disability, looks, gender, race, etc., so he's declared himself fair game. He's a billionaire whose every utterance gets outsized attention. So any punches at him are punches up.

It's also intended to goad him into responding, in which case - what's the phrase? - you're living "rent-free inside his head."

i guess on this topic a little variety is necessary. hearing people constantly repeat that donald trump is an objectively bad human being gets pretty tiresome after a while, and it's just as ineffective as humor on its intended audience. anything that allows people to keep making the necessary point that donald trump is an objectively bad human being is okay in my book.

I'd guess you'd find a lot of comedians who agree with the "punching up/punching down" thing.

"Making fun of" taken as equalling all of being funny is a ridiculous position even were all of the rest inarguable

During a recent performance review at work, I was told I have a "reputation problem", because people don't know if I'm being serious or be funny or really anything. I feel like I use humor a lot, but I'm incapable of smiling or laughing at my own joke after delivery, so people just sit there and wonder. Because of this reputation problem, I've been weaning myself off of using humor. I'm sure next review I'll learn that I'm always too serious and should lighten up.

That sucks dude. I hate when workplaces try to micromanage people's personalities.

I have the opposite problem with you, Jeff. I assume (or used to) that 99% of your gruff remarks are in jest, but I learned that I'm often wrong. To me, you're constantly hilarious.

I feel like I use humor a lot, but I'm incapable of smiling or laughing at my own joke after delivery, so people just sit there and wonder.

― Jeff, Wednesday, June 15, 2016 9:32 AM (26 minutes ago)

I do think this particular humor style can be alienating and have tried to wean myself off it. Not saying anything about you, Jeff, but some years ago I decided that I was using it in a rather arrogant manner, setting up jokes as tests for others to pass or fail.

Arah fuck ppl too at the same time yknow?

deadpan is not appreciated by the masses in some parts of the world

it has its time and place unfortunately

one thing i've been doing at work lately is every time i hear a horrible joke (almost every joke) i do a purposefully forced "HHHHEH" (a single HEH), pause and look at them seriously. no one gets it and i just move on

but people still love that benny hill/mr bean stuff so

people loved Benny Hill stuff in the 1920s when other comics did it

people have and always will love slapstick is what i'm saying

Unlike other performance types, you really can't argue if most of the audience doesn't laugh, "I was good."

On the other hand, there are comics who routinely leave huge audiences helpless with laughter about whom one can say, fully justifiably, that they are really bad.

As noted above, there are a lot of ways to get an easy laugh. You can do it just by being nasty and having good timing. Sometimes people laugh out of discomfort or surprise.

that's a criticism of the audience as well tho

xp

Michael O'Donoghue "provoking laughter is the lowest form of comedy" etc

Continual repeated jump towards "nasty" itt makes me v sad for yis that have been so horrifically scarred by humour in yr lives

IME there's an uncanny valley, where you can't tell if a potentially down-punchy joke is meant at face value or not. Is it

A. Intended to make you sympathetic with the joker (hey, loosen up, it's just a damn JOKE), or

B. Intended to express sympathy with the target (i.e., jokes intended to show how the joke is ACTUALLY on the person who is so horrible as to have racist/sexist/ableist views in the first place).

I used to know a guy whose fave joke was "Do you know why there are so many battered women in America?" (dramatic pause) "Because they just don't fuckin' LISTEN!" Now that's a pretty down-punchy joke. I don't like it much.

If Rodney Dangerfield or whoever is still out there saying "wow, bitches sure do take a long time to get ready, amirite"?

I would like to point out for the record that Dangerfield never did this, the butt of his jokes was *always* Rodney.

many xxposts

Sorry, that was sloppy, I should have come up with a better standin for the category "old white out-of-touch comedian." I would welcome suggestions for who would fill that bill more accurately.

Don Rickles

louis ck

Continual repeated jump towards "nasty" itt makes me v sad for yis that have been so horrifically scarred by humour in yr lives

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac)

oh, no, it's not that. it's just that i am a mean, nasty, and vicious person, and in the past i let a lot of that come out through my "jokes".

Wd have a pint with

everyone had at least one laugh at the special ed kids in school as a kid, but I'd like to think we're better than that as adults.

or when someone falls on the street -- you can laugh or you can see if they're ok. We all have the potential to laugh, but it's not the best impulse to cultivate.

well idk depends on who fell. was it Dick Cheney?

everyone had at least one laugh at the special ed kids in school as a kid, but I'd like to think we're better than that as adults.

True about my own childhood, but I am not sure it's still true. I have one special ed kid and one "normal" kid, and I observe them and their peers quite closely. Contemporary kids (at least the ones I encounter) are pretty tolerant of diversity and difference, if not totally woke. When naming the children, I remember shying away from names that would have gotten a person beaten up on the playground in my day, and my wife was like "yeah kids don't do that anymore, because they're all like Sheldon and Atticus and Marley."

They've imbibed a LOT of Sesame Street-style "it's okay to be different" messaging. So did we, of course, but now it seems to have taken.

Just speaking from my own neighborhood, I find that to be true from observation on the playground. For example there's a kid maybe 9 years old or so there a lot who seems to have some kind of emotional issue that leads him to have sort of breakdowns that are out of proportion to the situation, crying or screaming over small things, and the other kids who play with him are very patient with him.

I remember shying away from names that would have gotten a person beaten up on the playground in my day

my wife refused to entertain the notion of naming our son Buck for precisely this reason

a friend of mine once ran into (and I mean ran) a glass door. I will never regret laughing. (he ended up fine.)

What socioracialdemographic did he belong to

Avian-American, sounds like

i like the idea that you can use the most hateful, demeaning language you can imagine at somebody and it has no moral content as long as you're joking

i mean i assume that's your position d unless you think there's some nuance we're missing

we could extend it from hateful and demeaning to actual threats? i'm just not sure saying "joeks" empties every kind of speech from any other meaning

Wd have a pint with

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac)

ok, but you're buying.

a friend of mine once ran into (and I mean ran) a glass door.

Have done this. What's worse, it was at a petrol station and had a big black and yellow warning stripe across it to prevent people being dumb enough to run into it. Have also gone through a screen door hard enough to punch holes in it with my teeth.

then what was your immediate petrol emotion?

i like the idea that you can use the most hateful, demeaning language you can imagine at somebody and it has no moral content as long as you're joking

― The Brexit Club (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:57 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean i assume that's your position d unless you think there's some nuance we're missing

we could extend it from hateful and demeaning to actual threats? i'm just not sure saying "joeks" empties every kind of speech from any other meaning

― The Brexit Club (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:58 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Theres a joke about reductio ad absurdum

and who is it on Daithi Bowsie?

You said it mate

ya at first i thought darragh was trolling because we were clearly talking about awful things (ie other people's serious misfortune) people have laughed at but have stopped laughing at or shouldn't laugh at

a kinder interpretation is that he was referring to harmless joshing

whatevs

it's a new day

god gave it to us

god also gave it to your mom

just joshing

touched by god (inappropriately)

Bump!

a friend of mine once ran into (and I mean ran) a glass door. I will never regret laughing. (he ended up fine.)

― ryan, Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:31 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What socioracialdemographic did he belong to

― Daithi Bowsie (darraghmac), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:42 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Avian-American, sounds like

― a 47-year-old chainsaw artist from South Carolina (Phil D.), Wednesday, 15 June 2016 22:49 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was solidly tyrannical

walked into a glass door in the old virgin megastore on oxford street in london and left a remarkably distinctr fogged up outline of my face on the glass. somehow no one else seemed to see me do this but I had to laugh out loud anyway. the inwards punch is the most noble of all imo

Truly

I feel like I use humor a lot, but I'm incapable of smiling or laughing at my own joke after delivery

this means you're a pro

ya rly. It takes all the muscles in your body not to do that. Once you master it, people end up not realising you're joking and you end up having to explain you're joking and it ruins years of training.

the good comedian, like the magician, never doth revealeth his secrets

a subtle cue from or a word to the wise is sufficient to exchange a hidden element

http://i.imgur.com/1BGuWoK.jpg