Monday, October 06, 2008

Why something is funny?

Word games are funny because they expose unexpected similarities, rimes:

What happens if they throw tomatoes to Pet Shop Boys
They obviously become Ketchup Boys

Their body temperature mixed up with tomatoes would certainly create such a thing

Word games are cheap because they do not refer enough to absurd situations
Their limited formulations may at best signify the best possible surprise combination that a language may offer.

Dialectics, imagination and surprise are maybe the three most fundemental components which make a human being laugh.

Except from some Eastern European, German or American lack of sense of humor, those three components are usually quite efficient in making someone laugh.

Dialectics.... the clash of the opposites, the most common way that clashing opposites make us laugh is related to moral order and to the social symbolic connotations of that morality.

For instance.... Papa Jean Paul II visiting New York had been interviewed by a journalist asking him his opinion about the high rate of prostitution in New York.

Papa had answered :"Is there prostitution in New York?"

The sensational title that the interviewer had written the following day was: "Papa asked in his first day in New York: Are there prostitutes in New York?"

Papa, a symbol of morality, makes as if he is clashing with his own moral stance (The journalist's sensational narrative skill), asking where he could find prostitutes to have fun...

A moral ciment embedded to its opposite (prostitution)........ Laughters follow

If a serious guy makes a joke, remaining serious, not laughing to his own joke.... The best climate for laughters...

Why?

His stunny serious posture contradicts with what he says.

If a Wife admits to his husband that she may possibly be pregnant and the guy just answers in a very cool and serious manner: "Don't worry such things happen"

This is found quite funny. Why?

Because, in social and moral thought, a husband should "normally" share the hapiness of a coming birth and should not take it as an illness which should go away soon...

Those deviations from the normal state of things are the fruits of dialectial innovation and imagination.

Our perceptions ready to inhalate any social construction as "normal", is "sur-prised" when exposed to such deviations especially when those are expressed as "normal" and "cool" narratives. That is why we laugh.

Those things are simply too ab-normal to be normally true. A cool stance is too normal when it is the outcome of an unexpected social deviation.

The outcome

We laugh...

The absurdity lies on the contradiction

The margins to which we more or less belong

And the forbidden "beyond" of those margins

Which gives a way out

Nerves tightened by social symbolic order

Thus breaths out the absurdity of stupid constructions


Honesty is more funny than a lie.
Because it has a substance
Which makes difference
A differential volume
....;not shadowy
But a substantial volume

If the honesty was purely itself, there would be nothing to laugh about it
But as the honeysty's mission is to counterweight shadows
it suddenly became an honesty symptomatically attached to a lie
Infected
An eroding substance
But still a substance
Provoking laughters...

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