The Tyranny of Humour

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"