The Tyranny of Humour

holiday confessional ilxing

irony is pretty much our primary tool as a feeling species and eventually when all of us who grew up in the 1990s are finally dead people will remember that the word doesn't mean "making fun of stuff" but refers to an attunement to the failure of expectations that is at root deeply humble, and that since probability and not physics is on some level the mother of the sciences lacking or failing to develop this sense is like never understanding that objects move when you push them, i.e., you won't ever have any idea what's going on

― the "intenterface" (difficult listening hour)

booming post tho

most difficult listening hour posts are booming posts

separate thread for 'laughing fits at funerals: what are the protocols?' or can we do that here too

original thought leading to current DN: "the arid banter of Rob Brydon"

twat

well I asked him about you and he says you're lovely, so

even our Hannah joeks about how bad that Blankety Blank rip-off is

Remind me again was part of the basis of this thread a few usuals claiming to be threatened by ppl with senses of humour within normal range or was there more to it (all dues to NV who is often the thoughtful vehicle too much obliging of some deeply questionable passengers imo)

To be clear I feel it wasn't but I do reset to that view in my head, iirc there was a decent discussion of this for a while.

Did, obv, we ever get it sorted? Good to get it up on the FAQ

i think u can just like read the thread?

:O

Feel tyrannised

Gershy never had to put up with this shit I'm sayin

Started with me wondering why kids couldn't just blog about their art projects without trying to work a stand-up routine in there iirc

I remember really agreeing with this thread when you posted it. Yet now I live somewhere that no one understands my dialect, and i can't be casually jokey in a natural way, and i feel like im fundamentally unable to express myself

yeah i'm probably tyrannically "funny guy" myself quite often when talking to people but here's the thing, when i catch myself doing it sometimes it feels like i'm performing rather than sincerely one to one communicating and that i think is the tyranny of every fucker wants to be Jimmy Carr

I think being "funny guy" isn't just about self-serving performance - and if showboating can make you feel better about yourself sometimes, there's nothing wrong with that - just as long as you understand when to turn it off. I work in a pretty emotionally demanding office - from the level of bureaucracy and bad managerial behaviour, to the nature of the work itself (helping child refugees). When life is tense, humour - even of the showboating variety, although preferably not - can put people at ease and designate places as safe spaces, where people can speak more freely.

(i.e. a good joke can free up a room of people to talk more honestly, rather than just create a circle jerk of one-upping banter)

article starts interesting and then talks about amy schumer, the ostensible reason for it, and then gets boring fast: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/knock-yourselves-out-schwartz

I have been working a lot lately on reducing my own use of humor and irony as a social defense, at just being able to take new people as they are, ask them genuine questions about themselves, take interest in them as people and be decent to them. It's partly a necessity of the awkwardness of being in this totally new social situation where people I never would have been friends with before are now my scene, being "dads" and living in the neighborhood. It's also a matter of overcoming personal insecurities and realizing that there's no reason to expect people to have some kind of natural dislike of me if I don't disarm them with humor.

Did, obv, we ever get it sorted?

Otm

"“Punching up” and “punching down” are relatively new pop-political terms, often found not far from words like “mansplaining,” “problematic,” and “trolling.”"
insightful

Problematic for the People

This would have given me a chuckle if it was about Peter Buck making an off-color remark.

Like man alive, I am actively trying not to use humor as a default social pose.

That said, I'm rarely trying to be "funny" in the conventional ha-ha sense, but I _think_ that I think in jokes - they are pretty much how I process the world.

To be more precise, the way I think is heavily dependent on quasi-jokey constructs especially puns and absurd exaggerations.

My mind is very language-based; correspondences between words preoccupy me 24/7. I could no sooner stop seeing anagrams, palindromes, and homonyms than I could stop seeing colors. I saw the word "standoffish" yesterday and went on a long mental expedition where it became "stand of fish," and so there I was imagining a fish-selling stand, and by the time I got back to the sentence in question, I'd lost the original thread of whatever it was I'd been reading. If I see a 2-pack of something in a store, I will reflexively call it a Shakur. It's hard for me to say the word "warmth" without reflecting on how "coolth" isn't its opposite. None of this is really funny or original, it's just how my brain occupies itself.

Sometimes I say stuff like this out loud, and people think I'm trying to be funny - as in, trying to make people laugh / trying to garner attention for myself / trying to be thought original or cute. But it's really not that, it's just that this is the way my mind works and I can't stop it. It is incumbent on me to curtail it.

The absurd exaggeration or completely over-the-top inappropriate suggestion is another tic, one I wish I could turn off. If I'm standing next to a barbecue grill and holding a baby, I'm going to suggest that the baby would be tasty if given a ginger-lime marinade. When I forget where my keys are, I tell my wife that it's time to put me out on the ice floe to die.

Again, none of this is really LOL funny, but it's where my head goes: say the thing that is very much not so, as a means of indicating that I really do love the baby and would absolutely never put her on the grill. Nabokov said something once about how his evilest characters are like gargoyles on the exteriors of cathedrals: they adorn the OUTSIDE, to show that they've been expelled and they're not inside.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coolth

to save you the effort the page lists "Clotho" as an anagram

Yeah I am also a compulsive mental punner. I was just talking with my wife about that the other day, who is completely not one at all to the point that she was actually curious as to how I come up with all my stupid puns.

I have a running joke with my four-year-old, who asks for a granola/kashii bar every morning by saying "can I have my bar now?" And I always respond "what, you want a barn owl?" And we riff on this for a few minutes and it never seems to get old. Or she'll say "Okay, so..." and I'll say "What? Queso?"

I read the punching up piece btw, and even had an exchange with its offer. I didn't much like it, and I hate to be that guy but it's noteworthy that the author and the comedians he quotes complaining about the phrase are white dudes. As I pointed out to him in the exchange, being "funny" should not be the supreme value, and in fact it's super easy to be "funny" by being crass or mean, probably the easiest way to get laughs. That's why they're called "cheap laughs." That's why every shitty nobody stand-up comic you go see in the worst dive clubs relies on bad ethnic stereotypes, women are dumb or annoying, non-punchline punchlines about sex and bodily functions, etc.

when I was small I'd ask my dad for a drink "I'm thirsty" "nice to meet you - I'm friday" he'd always reply eventually I died of dehydration

lol, that reminds me that a co-worker just told me a story about a friend who would do the "put that coffee down, coffee is for closers" bit literally every morning when his wife made coffee. She hated it so much that she started getting up earlier to make coffee, and they eventually divorced.

There is no more noble act than laughing at someone else's suffering. And there's oculus lump difference between impoverished people joking about the rich and rich people joking about the impoverished.

Oculus = obviously, for some reason.

And lump = no. Oh dear, forget it. If dusk snark fish shah me to all of you!

I think the point the article was trying to make was sort of "leave the comedy to the comedians" and that it's these annoying social justicey types coming up with the "punching up/punching down" standard. (1) I doubt that's true (2) I don't give a shit about leaving the comedy to the comedians, fuck comedians

in fact there is no more noble act than laughing at someone else's autocorrect

:(

:)

lol I also seem to have said I had an exchange with the piece's "offer" instead of its "author".

speaking of puns

i stopped being funny entirely a few years ago. it's not that great. i wouldn't recommend it.

There's a good John Cleese interview clip out there somewhere where he basically links ceasing to be funny with giving up and succumbing to a kind of total cynicism about the world, I'm not putting it exactly the way he does, but he basically makes humor out to be something you experience when you are able to believe that people mostly know what they're doing but occasionally there are these anomalies that create humor, but eventually you get old and realize no one has any idea what they're doing at all.

Oh god

Attempting to assess humour by reference to morality is like gauging direction by reference to flavour

If you have to filter humour by agreement with your own personal whatever first then youre a bad person

The punching up/punching down framework works if you view humor simply as a rhetorical tool, but it's really much broader than that. It's an entire dimension of communication. Irony for instance can be used tactfully to "make a point" but it's also just out most naturalized way of minding the gap between language and reality. It's a distancing mechanism.

Laurie Anderson was saying "ethics is the aesthetics of the future" in the 80s, but she also spelled it "few... ture" to imply that this would be so mainly inside a bubble of privilege.

When I studied aesthetics as a young philosophy major (same time frame), we spent a lot of time on humor. The language of punch up/punch down had not yet been invented, but we did speak in terms of inversion of power structures as a source of humor. Interestingly, inversion of power structures was regarded as a subset of surprise. You're surprised to see the duck inside the refrigerator, that's why the joke is funny. You're surprised to see the bum triumphing over the millionaire, that's why those situations are funny. Or so the theory went.

One reason I quit standup comedy (aside from it being very hard and I wasn't particularly good at it, or willing to work at getting better) was what I thought of as "the tyranny of laughter." Unlike other performance types, you really can't argue if most of the audience doesn't laugh, "I was good." There is no evaluative base on which to stand there; success = laughter. (Aside from the expense, I've been to a comedy club 4 or fewer times in the last 20 years bcz I don't enjoy the standup aesthetic.)

There's a good John Cleese interview clip out there somewhere where he basically links ceasing to be funny with giving up and succumbing to a kind of total cynicism about the world

And he would know. Not half, Jesus Christ.

Was too slow off the mark with Oculus Lump I see, dammit.

More re: punching up vs. down.

I think in "comedy" (broadly considered as an institution with implicit "rules" and as an industry that responds to market forces) the battle is largely over. There are holdouts in bunkers still punching down. Here are three suggested flavors:

1. Retro throwbacks, like those Japanese WWII dudes on islands who hadn't gotten word that the Emperor has surrendered.

2. Contrarians who want specifically to play up how "daring" they are, ostentatiously barbecuing a sacred cow specifically in order to be called "daring."

3. Meta-satirists specifically deciding to act as though punching down were still allowed largely to show that know it isn't.

If Rodney Dangerfield or whoever is still out there saying "wow, bitches sure do take a long time to get ready, amirite"? That's type 1. Eddie Murphy's "gay police" routine was seen as risque but allowable in the 80s. Andrew Dice Clay's "There was an old woman who had so many kids HER UTERUS FELL OUT" was seen as raunchy but within the bounds of comedic discourse.

When Anthony Jeselnik says something like "my girlfriend doesn't have pubic hair.... YET" in 2015, he's either in category 2 or 3. I don't know which, and I think he wants you to wonder which one it is.

here is my argument against attempting to be funny on the internet.

it is extremely hard to be funny without being cruel. most of the available targets for making fun of on the internet these days are, well, probably insane. or at the very least deranged. this doesn't mean they're not responsible for their words and actions, but humor is fleeting, and the results of merciless ridicule of profoundly damaged human beings are lasting. which is to say that humor is a very bad way of holding people responsible for their words and actions.

even when someone is fully worthy of all the scorn and contempt you can possibly dish out against them, the larger point of such scorn and contempt, beyond an immediate selfish self-satisfaction, is elusive. let us take, for instance, donald trump. this is someone who is, to the extent that we can judge other human beings, a very, very, very, very bad person. and because of this, we call him "orange". yes, very funny. ha ha. this probably genocidal egotist's skin color is a shade of orange.

possibly it is to stave off the existential depression caused by the knowledge that a good portion of the world's population thinks that the world should be led by either trump or by some local equivalent. but i don't think it's very effective at that, either.

i think it's okay (and occasionally funny) to make fun of donald trump