First, the obligatory Old Man’s Reminiscence. By the time you get to my age, you’ve got a reminiscence for pretty much every situation. But usually only one, and people are sick to death of hearing it.
When I was in high school I took a Public Speaking class. I think it was there that I figured out I was good at public speaking, or at least that I enjoyed it, whether anybody enjoyed listening or not. I did a speech one week on Humor. I forget what I said – something about humor being related to truth. My teacher gave me a good grade, and said she’d like to see me develop it into an Original Oration, for district competition.
I thought about it, and wanted to do it. But I gave it up, because what I’d already said (little as it was) was pretty much all I could think of on the subject. And all I could find written on the subject seemed to agree that nobody knew how humor worked.
Well, more than fifty years have passed. And I think I have a theory. If it’s any good, it’s probably been said before. If it’s original, it’s probably twaddle. So I can’t really win with this. But I don’t have a book to review tonight, and I’m arrogant enough to post the theory here.
As I was saying in high school, before I was so rudely interrupted by time, humor is about truth. Doesn’t have to be a major, serious truth. It could be a small truth. All it needs to be is something we all recognize and share as part of our common life on this planet.
The humorist, instead of just stating bald fact, plays with the truth. It’s like a game of… Dodgeball, I guess. In Dodgeball, you have to keep on the lookout, because the ball might come at you from any direction. The humorist lobs the truth at you from a direction you don’t expect. You see it in a new way, you’re surprised, and (here the Dodgeball analogy breaks down), you’re amused. You laugh.
Or perhaps I could put it more crudely. Humor is the truth mooning you. Showing its backside.
“But,” you might say (especially if you viewed the clip above, the funniest scene from possibly the funniest film every made, “Duck Soup”), “that doesn’t apply to anarchic humor like the Marx Brothers or Monty Python.”
True, but I am prepared with an equivocation. Anarchic humor is the obverse of the same game. Here the truth does not surprise by its appearance, but by its absence. It’s made conspicuous by said absence. Ultimately, it declares the truth too.
(That, by the way, is why Monty Python generally didn’t offend me. People spoke of their humor subverting rationality. But I thought it emphasized rationality. Monty Python’s world was what we’d live in if the Postmodern philosophers were right. But the fact that the world isn’t like that – that Monty Python is funny, not a documentary – seemed to me to reinforce rationality.)
This theory is available for purchase by any large, wealthy, soulless corporation, in return for extravagant sums of money and the services of a valet.
I’ve been reading Lord Peter Wimsey stories, and I’m relatively sure I need a valet pretty badly.
