The Tyranny of Humour

sometimes I forget to change stations when some desperately unfunny smug/witless R4 comedy comes on. I guess bad comedy is a different type of tyranny than what this thread was intended for. But I feel like it must be some kind of joyless imitative crowd behaviour tyranny, when a live audience is laughing out loud at such dross.

I thought the recent Frankie Boyle's New World Order ep was one of the best responses to Grenfell I have seen on the bbc. Obv that is a very low bar, and there isn't any humour to be derived from the needless corporate manslaughter of 100s of people. But it was the only response on the bbc I've seen so far that wasn't either N Robinson style apologist propaganda or insincere po-faced fakery.

https://slate.com/arts/2017/07/trump-and-his-trolls-arent-killing-comedy-theyre-saving-it.html

Fuck me that needs editing down to

Baudelaire, in his treatise on laughter, makes a distinction between “significative comedy,” which you recognize by its carefully expressed “moral idea,” and “absolute comedy,” which you recognize because you are laughing.

lol yes everything else is commentary

The best of it is the treatment of the Lenny Bruce era et al school of comedy as having an inherent sociopolitical bias which is of course what this thread is really about, ilxors reaction against this being proven time and time again as a fallacy

Mike Birbiglia's success is evidence of how dire the comedy circuit is these days

aw, he's funny, calm down

the tyranny of scatological humour

Just don't look

kind of want to start a thread about differing senses of humour, but this thread will do

obviously a thinly-veiled continuation of my attack on ilx - 'the tyranny of lame humour' - excelsior tariff lower than ever, genuine waspish wit or ingenuity at an all-time retreat, j'accuse

or has this always been cuddlestein mountain

Im more interested in the humour of tyranny these days tbh

Lol nothing matters

Straight talk from someone at the end of a 93 hour day

if ILX isn’t funny enough, you have to be be funnier

that's like asking someone to tell a joke though

"be funny!"

"um uh yes okay have you heard the one about the uh two lizards in a barrel"

they got so drunk they performed mutual autotomy!

thank you i do weddings

thank God we’re already married

What a revelation

^this is the stuff

one of the cruelest parts of childhood was my sister - seconds after i had declared that my life ambition was to be a stand-up comedian - daring me to make her laugh and never laughing ever again. i fucking HATE when people do that!

but it taught me an important lesson: you can never ask laugh. seriously - you have to do it yourself

94/7

eliane radigue's trilogie de la mort fucking did the trick, that's a great ambient experience. binaural. might go walk in the neighborhood and freak some dogs out this morning!

Dogs can be pretty funny. I'm a big fan (and my family hates me for) Kids Write Jokes, which can be hit or miss but often errs on the side of perfectly surreal. My favorite recent joke was "what's black and white and is a panda?" That's the entire joke.

i guess we've also reached a sort of humour singularity, where (for example) AI Weirdness is funnier than most human humour

I read that as "Al Weirdness" like it was the formal name on "Weird" Al's driver's license.

i honestly feel like i'm ready for the new era of humor. i don't know what that is yet, but i'm ready to be ruled

Are you ready to laugh?

FUCKING OD ME WITH FUNNY

cue: the cold war!

I think "humour" has come to stand in for "things that use the techniques of humour" rather than "things that are actually funny and make you laugh".

Like, I am pro-laughing but anti-"humour"

I'm not sure where "twats who find everything hilarious" fit into this theory, though

at the end of a long day and a long night, i only believe in the four humors, and i would prefer a good balance between them

Some really funny stuff on twitter.com ime

On some days the John Cage-ification of the oldest joke in the world is preferable to the dazzling Tyranny of Cenacle Wit.

If i started a thread about it being good to be able to laugh i doubt the tenor of responses would be any different so im glad i havent tbh

listen, i feel like everyone is afraid of something: being asked to make everyone else laugh. everyone is asking everyone else to laugh, and everyone is feeling all the feelings all about it.

but i will do what no one else has ever done, infinitely, before: i will not ask anyone to make me laugh, ever

https://i.insider.com/554786186bb3f78f7d33ba2f?width=1200&format=jpeg

The fart song thread was good for a few cheap laffs and I'd moved on days ago but now I'm feeling strangely compelled to make sure that thing gets bumped to the top of SNA in perpetuity.

https://data.whicdn.com/images/158810598/original.gif

obviously a thinly-veiled continuation of my attack on ilx - 'the tyranny of lame humour' - excelsior tariff lower than ever, genuine waspish wit or ingenuity at an all-time retreat, j'accuse

The irony of this being that the offending thread was started by an old school ILXor who literally posts about once a year.

i'd like to think he started it as an arch commentary on why he barely posts

xps to OL

Scamp Granada (gyac)
Posted: 21 March 2021 at 18:19:58
My stance on stupid threads is that people should be contributing more to ones they like to keep bad threads down, but I also don’t blame anyone for seeing bad threads and thinking “fuck this”.

It's good to know that you don't blame me for my feelings about this thread.

Be the change you want to see in ILX.

(farts)

Streisand effect ftw.