The Tyranny of Humour

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.