The Tyranny of Humour

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).