comedy part 1

Recently I've been obsessing over why things are funny.  I was watching Casablanca a few weeks ago, for reasons I'll explain another time (new favorite movie by the way) and for some reason, something about that movie made something about humor click for me.  For a moment I thought that I had discovered a master theory of why anything might be funny ever, but then I remembered puns and they completely violate my thesis, so I realized I'm only explaining one part of a much broader phenomenon.  But to get to the point, my theory is that sometimes...

humor is failure without frustration

 

Think about times when people laugh, but not because something is funny.  You're 100% sure that you're going to die, but you're rescued at the last second.  It isn't funny, but you can't help laughing.  You think you're going to spend the rest of your life broke and petulant, but the prize patrol shows up at your door with 11 million dollars.  Again, not funny, but you laugh.  You laugh because you feel intense relief.  And that's exactly what this kind of humor is.

Do you remember that commercial where the drunk girl tries to take a pull on her beer but she accidentally knocks her own front teeth out and then her and her friend laugh about it and then the state helpfully reminds you that driving while drunk is a dick move?  I thought it was funny too.  And while few of us can hold the honor of self dentistry, most of us can identify with how hilarious people hurting themselves is when you're drunk.  That's because being drunk removes the sense of moral responsibility.  You don't think about long term consequences.  You don't even think about the consequences for an hour from now.  And the euphoria of lacking moral responsibility drives people to purposefully make decisions they know they're going to regret, just to feel the temporary relief of failure without shame.

Or think about Ben Stiller movies.  People find them funny, because he is constantly failing socially.  They have a fear of social failure, and his movies give them the opportunity to experience social failure without experiencing any loss of value.  Some people, like myself, can't find them funny.  I've never laughed at any of them.  I used to feel bad for him.  Now he just pisses me off. (cowardice isn't funny, Ben. Grow up.)

If you fail and you lack confidence in your ability to succeed, you experience grief, anger, or even despair.  If it's your first day at work and you make a simple mistake, it's a tragedy.  But if you've been there for decades and you make that same simple mistake, you laugh at yourself.  In both cases you failed, but in the second case you didn't feel frustrated.  You know that you can do this job in principle, and you know how to fix the mistake very quickly, and you know that everyone else knows that too.

The same is true if someone else fails.  If they fail, and you aren't concerned about it, it's funny.  If it's someone you care about, and you both know that they won't suffer too much from it, it's funny.  If it's a stranger you don't care about, it's funny.  If it's someone you hate, not only does it produce an almost embarrassing satisfaction, it's also funny.  And no matter who it is, the more tragic the failure, the harder it is to find it funny, because the harder it is to suspend empathy.

So the kind of humor you prefer may say something about the kind of fears that you have. Slapstick is a fear of failing physically. Crassness is a fear of failing physiologically. Insults are a fear of failing hierarchically. Sarcasm is a fear of failing intimately. Irony is a fear of failing to recognize failure.

But that brings us back to puns.  Because puns are not failure of any kind.  Puns aren't about fears.  Puns don't produce relief.  Why should word play cleverness be funny?  I invite your suggestions.