The Tyranny of Humour

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.