GSOH: Have You Got One? Do You Think You Have One?

"Frigate: a boat nobody cares about"

"Samantha has been promoted to a team leader, and she says she'll give everyone a team talk in the meeting room and then hand jobs out in the office."

Not thinking Friends is remotely funny != having no sense of humour.

it's more a question of... filling out this form for a dating site, there were a list of things/comedies/comedians and you had to rate them Not Funny/I Don't Really Get It/Amusing/ROTFL. And most of them I considered in the Not Funny/Don't Really Get It range.

So I'm kind of asking "What do you find funny, about the things that you find funny?"

on the other hand, excelsior thread is, as i have said before, the canned laughter of ilx. unless i'm on it, in which case it has its finger on the motherfucking pulse of comedy.

exactly.

of course you are not going to find everything on there funny.

i don't like the excelsior thread titles either, but i've only ever started two i think.

Johnney B's post up there about liking puns is the kind of thing I'm looking for.

What I find most hillarious is absurdity. Things which don't quite fit properly, which are close but not quite right and cause a second glance.

Humor comes from three sources: suprise, revelation of taboo/shameful shared experience, and/or audatious action. Examples? A glade plug in commercial always makes my mom laugh, in which a Gargoyle says "plug it in, plug it in" at the end. My mom explains "It's always such a suprise to see a GARGOYLE start to TALK!". Example of technique number two, in the film Swingers, a man calls a woman's anwering machine several times in a row, churning himself into a veritable creame of terror. We've all been there before, right guys? But it's funny to know that it's happend to somebody else! Example three, a fart.

A prime example of a combination a these three techniques is a comedy bit performed bt Mr. Eddie Murphy in the film Raw, where he desrcibes in detail the suprising, universal, and quite audatious peril of being all out of toilet paper at a public bathroom. The crowd roars with laughter.

Now I ask the question, is it a ethical and moral persuit to attempt to be suprising, to be a speaker of hidden truths, or to be audatious? It is certainly not a poor choice to suprise a friend once and a while, and the speaking of hidden univeral truths was the catalyst of almost every social movement in history. Audatiousness is a sign of confidence and power. Fine. Good. But to carry out these traits falsely in attempt to make people laugh, could be the greatest social crime. Worse than using people for sex, worse than telling someone your dad knows Rod Stewart so they'll come over your house, worse than wearing fake rubber ass. Who is more despicable than the stand up comic? Who is more self absorbed, more dishonest, more sybolic of everything wrong with human social practice? CROOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTOOOOOOOO OORRRRRRRRRYYYYYY

-- Zaftig Cid (jon_holme...), October 9th, 2001 1:00 AM.

Personally, I don't really find quotes and catchphrases funny. Humour is about context. A stuffed animal lying on the floor of a bank is funny. That same stuffed animal lying on the floor of a nursery is not funny.

x-post.

It's all about the unexpected for me; the reason puns are funny is that they jump from one meaning to another REALLY quickly - a mainstay of comedy. I also love unexpected words and phrases being thrown about, hence me finding Chris Morris very funny.

List some of the things/comedies/comedians on that site, and I'll tell you if they're funny or not.

i love extreme silliness but only when done with extreme cleverness, eg python.

g-kit otm about the excelsior titles, but i thought they were deliberately shit?

shh, just read the sweary part again.

One is mostly funny. I don't find two that funny. Three is sometimes funny, but it depends on the context.

"Fuck Washing A Hat" was on the excel thread, I'd have missed it otherwise, and I was basically 'killt' for the rest of the day.

This is very true. I don't really understand scripted humour, I guess. I don't like being put in a situation and told "this is funny, YOU VILL LAFF!!!"

kate, you have a sense of humour, i've seen it. infact i think your cold coffee joke might be my favourite structured/ongoing/slightly surreal one

I love the cold coffee joke, clearly. But what is funny about it (sorry to ruin the surprise for anyone who's never heard it) is not the joke, but the build up. It goes on and on and seems like it's going to get funnier and funnier as you tell it. And it builds up such expectation, and the punchline is such a non-entity - that what is actually FUNNY is the utter incongruity between the expectation of humour and the lack of delivery. The funniest thing about it is the look on the face of the person who hasn't heard it before, while everyone who has heard it before collapses around them in laughter.

Which I suppose might have an element of cruelty. But it's more about surprise and the shared experience.

And the funny accents. Funny accents are always funny.

to answer the question though. things i find most funny i think are satire, and irony. i dunno, finding a knife when all you need is a fork. and i like puns.

anything with monkeys in it are funny.

absurdity i find a bit rubbish, like slap stick stuff i don't like too much, unless there's a reason in the slap stickiness. like, falling over banana skin for the sake of it isn't terribly funny. i can't think of what can be funny though that has to do with slipping on banana skin. maybe if a monkey slipped on one.

win/win.

I would be tempted to agree with this, but I saw Richard Herring last Saturday and he did a joke analysis which ended with "I confounded your expectations, and thence the humour arose." Which, despite being just a repeated catchphrase, made me laugh.

He then followed it with, almost as an aside "And then I got off the bus; but I was the teacher; ah" and (despite compounding the catchphrase repetition) had me on the floor.

Really does depend on the subject/situation/delivery/characters. I tend to sympathise with the victim or stooge out of compassion, but if the situation is both absurd enough and there is ultimately some sort of redemption or reward for the initial victim then i will laugh. I think cruelty humour tends to work better in animated comedies such as South Park where the intention to offend is so blatant that you can just relax about it a bit more. But I've berated The Simpsons in recent years for relying on cruelty too much without backing it up with anything more substantial or rewarding for the stooges.

What about (endless) repetition?

often, saying it again the third time is funny, saying it again for the sixth time is not funny, saying it again for the tenth time is funny again. again it all depends. and there has to be some sort of pay-off at the end or deviation at some point.

Are catchphrases naturally funny?

i think they appeal more when you're young as they're simplistic and recognisable thus re-asssuring. i do cringe now when i think how much quoting we did of Harry Enfield, Fast Show etc. ten years ago - but that doesn't necess. mean i was 'wrong' to find them funny at the time.

what makes you think you're being 'told' to find it funny?

like, falling over banana skin for the sake of it isn't terribly funny. i can't think of what can be funny though that has to do with slipping on banana skin.

but a Larson illustration of a penguin on an ice plain sitting on it's arse staring puzzled at a banana skin in front of it, IS, to me, quite funny - because it's the absurdity of there being a banana skin there and a certain layer of irony (slipping on banana but not ice) combined with slapstick of slipping on a banana that make it good.

Several times in the past week, during the mortgage application process, I've been faced with bank managers, financial advisors etc. who, in the midst of keying in something say "Computer says... NO!" and chortle to themselves. And I just kind of look at them completely puzzled.

And it wasn't until later that it was explained to me that this was actually a reference to a sketch on a comedy programme that I have never seen. And they were making a joke, not turning me down.

Personally, I think catchphrases are a bit lazy. Like relying on someone else's funniness rather than your own. But more often than not I feel like the person who loses the Alan Ayckbourn game.

omg that does sound funny. also you forgot that penguins (espeically big fat ones) are almost as funny as monkeys in terms of funniness.

OMG this mpeg i saw of this penguin sticking out its foot to trip over another penguin that then fell into the water hole! omg omg omg that was the funniest MPEG i've ever seen.

Yes, a little bit. Yes, a lot. Yes. Not by their nature, but they can be. Often, but not always.

Some things used to be funny but aren't nowadays e.g. ladders.

Some things (most things) aren't intrinsically funny, but context is everything.

i'm not sure where this if from but i am finding this funny, esp. if they said it that excitedly.

(see, i hate talking about it, i know what's going on but i don't want to look directly at it.)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpost

there is something a bit sad about the fact we pay people to make us larf.

you really think? comedy is just as much an artform as acting, playing music or whatever.

i can't think of anything else off the top of my head

not very funny bit
1. that dance (it's ridiculous yes but not really funny)

What? It's no more 'conversational' than a gig or play. Someone performs in front of an audience. If they don't laugh then is it still funny? If the crowd don't cheer at the gig is it still music (or at least good music)? The participation level is really the same. Bands surely require participation from the audience in terms of demonstrating appreciation in the same way that comedians or comedy actors do. You might as well say music is something you should particpate in, not watch others do.

maybe it's more like paying for a blowjob then

But watching someone tell jokes... I just don't understand that.

That's rather imperious. I'll let you know when the thread is done.

...and you're totally not going to get the humor in that.

I wonder if, because humor really only exists between people, you can't look at in isolation, you need a...community yardstick. Think of what friend(s) of yours you find most amusing, or actually, who makes YOU feel the most like YOU'RE funny? Who laughs at your jokes, plays off your lines, etc? Use that person as a starting point and work outward: when I'm with Brian I feel funny BECAUSE x, y, z. What other things does he find funny? Do I agree with him? Etc. Sorry to be tedious but really, it's a..."questing" process. Choose one person who makes you feel most yourself and use him/her as a touchstone as you branch out.

I feel like this is indicative of something that might be related to your anti-joke view: you seem to feel that if you start a thread, you somehow OWN it and are entitled to some kind of control over where the thread goes. Hence, you start a "SERIOUS THREAD" and get annoyed when people start to take it less than seriously.

haha

you seem to feel that if you start a thread, you somehow OWN it and are entitled to some kind of control over where the thread goes. Hence, you start a "SERIOUS THREAD" and get annoyed when people start to take it less than seriously.

And what's wrong with thinking that? I *DO* think that the person who starts a thread specifies what the thread topic is, and has a right to object and/or ask for the derailers to start their own thread if the thread goes seriously off topic.

i.e. if you have requested a thread to be serious, then you do have an expectation that the thread should remain serious.

I do think that thread starting signifies a kind of ownership or at least guidance. Otherwise, what's what the point of setting topics at all?

after a 10 post absence ;)

As an aside: can we formalize some kind of ILx-specific Godwin's law that deals with the certainty of all threads eventually succumbing to a blizzard of silly gag pictures?

xpost That's funny! See, like, monkeys DON"T NORMALLY PLAY TENNIS BUT NOW THEY ARE.

it's popular, too

Things that piss me off:

1) People who change the subject and derail serious threads.
People who don't number their entries on list threads.
1) People who re-use the same number on list threads.

What constitutes your sense of humour, i.e. what kinds of things do you find funny? All sorts of things

Do you find humour in cruelty? Sometimes, it all depends on if the 'victim' is privy to the joke or not.

In absurdity? Yep

What about (endless) repetition? I guess so, we must repeat.

Are catchphrases naturally funny? Not always

Or is it situational, all in the timing? Often.

"GSOH" = "You laugh at my stupid jokes."

Everyone thinks they have one, or are one.

xpost

Recently, Ken C's general way of going on has made me laugh a bit, plus I laughed at some bits of that wallace and gromit movie.

Dan P sometimes picks things in the excelsior threads that actually make me laugh a bit, but they (excelsior threads) are pretty grim reading for me for the most part.

I dislike the phrase 'good sense of humour' and would run a mile from anyone who described him or herself to me as having one. To me this means the same as 'I'm a bit kerr-AZY', which just means they have no attention span and will interrupt every interesting conversation you try to have with someone else by saying something that's supposed to be funny but is just brainless.