The Tyranny of Humour

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.