I’m up against it tonight. A meeting to attend tonight, a meeting to attend tomorrow, and a fairly large translation job to do whenever I can squeeze it in.
Above, the divine Sissel, doing “Solveig’s Song” by Edvard Grieg, from his music for Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.”
She’s wearing the Bergen folk costume.
This clip from “A Night At the Opera” includes one of my favorite Groucho lines: “When I invite a woman out to dinner, I expect her to face me… That’s the price she has to pay.”
Reading another long book right now, so I guess I’ll dig myself further into a hole by elaborating on my puerile theory of humor. Basically, my theory is that humor is just telling the truth, but lobbing it in from an unexpected direction.
The truth in question doesn’t have to a big Major Truth. It could be a banal truth – the fact that you put one sock on before the other in the morning, or that the big box store always has about ten check-out stations, though never more than 2 of them are open. Puns, of course, depend on the most pointless of truths – that some words sound the same as others. It’s the surprising angle of approach, not the subject matter, that makes it funny. Groucho employs stream of consciousness in his dialogue – what he says makes sense, but only if you disregard context. Result: constant surprise. A roller coaster of illogic.
Every witty person has his own style. I think that’s what makes wit possible. One learns a particular angle of approach to the truth, and finds ways to apply it in lots of different situations. I once wrote on this blog (whether in this iteration or the original version) that I sometimes think I learned one joke when I was a teenager, and have been repeating it in various forms ever since.
I know you probably regard me as a man of iron, inured to all pain, physical and emotional. But in fact, there are limits to my endurance. It’s possible to write books that drive me away just by being too good, in terms of action and dramatic tension.
I think that’s the situation with Alex Smith’s Whip Crack, fourth in his DCI Robert Kett series. (SPOILER ALERT: If you are reading this series and have not yet finished the third book, Three Little Pigs, you should stop reading here. Parts of my synopsis must necessarily give away some of the ending of that book.)
Robbie Kett has been suspended from the force, due to the extremes he went to, to rescue his children and his wife Billie (who had been kidnapped and held prisoner 5 months). Now they’re back together, but they’re all damaged. Especially in his relationship with Billie, he’s walking on eggshells, never sure what to do to help her readjust to freedom and love.
When four young teenagers disappear in a lonely town on the Norfolk coast, his superior doesn’t order Robbie to go investigate, but pointedly lends him his holiday “caravan” (trailer) near the crime scene. He knows Robbie can’t resist this kind of case.
The four teenagers, all close friends, have been lured away from their homes by recordings on cassette players. Similar players have been left behind with messages for the investigators. With difficulty, the police are able to trace the man who bought the players, a local drug dealer. The only problem is that he’s killed himself. If they’re going to locate the missing kids, they’re going to have to solve the recorded riddles he left behind.
But there’s more to the mystery than even that. Robbie can sense something more is going on – and he’s right. I thought I had figured it out, but it was even weirder than I imagined.
Whip Crack is taut, harrowing, and exciting. The prose is good, too. I can’t fault author Smith on his craftsmanship. Also, he employs some tricks to avoid too much profanity.
But give me a break, guy. Poor Robbie has been through four thrillers now, and in each book he gets injured more – physically and emotionally – and he hasn’t been given time yet to heal up from the first book. My empathy needle is spiking here. I don’t think I can handle the next installment.
Recommended, if you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.
To pick up on Lars’s post about humor using truth to make the joke, I thought I’d note a common subject of humor that seems to have fallen out of favor with some. That’s when the jokes fall into an area of culture or ethnicity.
Stephen He hails from China and says in one video he has only been in the States for three years. He makes videos like this one for YouTube and TikTok. Since I assume you haven’t watched the video yet, let me tell you it’s funny. But why is it funny?
It’s funny for multiple reasons:
But these ideas are rolled generally into the vague stereotype of overachieving Asian adults. In some ways, the particular ethnicity makes it work. Imagine how a skit like this would run if the substitute teacher was Canadian. It wouldn’t. The substitute has to have the air of overachievement or strict standards. The context of a shame culture helps too.
On the other hand, the particular ethnicity doesn’t matter because the comic ideas or widely seen. I’ve heard Asian Americans talk about their parents, laughing about the exact same things Southerners, Cuban Americans, Pakistanis, and Jews say about their parents. All of us are a lot alike.
On the other, other hand, the particular ethnicity matters because specifics are the true things that make a joke funny. For example, what if you replaced your Alexa with your Cuban Abuela? The essence of the joke may be universal, but the comic has to take it somewhere specific to get a laugh.
But it’s become unpopular to joke about people outside your own tribe. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly unpopular to criticize people outside your own tribe. If Stephen looked Irish instead of Chinese (he says he’s Chinese Irish, which naturally accounts for his good looks), would he be able to tell the same jokes? Oversensitivity among other things would shut him down.
The above clip from the Marx Brothers’ “A Night At the Opera” is provided for no other reason than to pad out the rest of this post, which doesn’t currently look promising in terms of thought or ideas. (The joke at the beginning about the “kids in Canada” is a reference to the Dionne Quintuplets, who were one of the big human interest stories of the day. Fertility drugs hadn’t been invented yet, so multiple births of that magnitude were pretty rare. If they’d had reality TV back then, the Dionnes would have had a show.)
Bee-yootiful day in Minneapolis today. Bright sun, temperatures in the mid-70s. I opened the sun roof on Miss Ingebretsen, my PT Cruiser, recently restored to me, then rolled the windows down and pretended I was driving a convertible.
Just before that, though, I had a shock to the system. I opened my garage door, and my car was MISSING!
(Cue scary orchestra chord: DUM-DUMMMMM)
Who stole it?
Who would steal an old PT Cruiser anyway?
How did they get in? The door isn’t damaged.
Don’t touch anything! There might be DNA evidence!
Then I remembered I’d parked it on the street when I got home from the gym, because I’d be driving it to lunch in a couple hours.
Am I getting Alzheimer’s?
(Cue scary musical chord: DUM-DUMMMMMM)
That’s possible, of course – witness my post about losing my keys not long ago (I forget exactly when. Don’t look at me like that).
But my memory is good enough to remember that I used to do the same sort of thing in my 20s. I am known internationally for my brilliance, my talent, my impeccable taste, and my irresistible charm. But I’ve never been known for my presence of mind.
Did I mention it was a Bee-yootiful day?
David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm books are not great literature, but they’re entertaining “English rural” police stories. Harry, you may recall, is a former English paratrooper who joined the police in Bristol after surviving an IUD explosion in Afghanistan. His wounds left him with rather severe facial scarring, which he cheerfully exploits in intimidating suspects. Transferred to a town in the Yorkshire Dales, he’s finding himself – to his own surprise – settling in comfortably with the laid-back, eccentric local force.
In Blood Sport, one of Harry’s colleagues is still smarting from the death, in a previous book, of a close friend who turned out to be a criminal involved in sheep rustling. When a dog is found dead, torn to pieces, in an abandoned barn, the ensuing investigation into illegal dog fighting leads to links with that sheep rustling operation. It’s all part of a large, organized conspiracy run by greedy and cruel people, something no one had looked for out here in the country. The worst part is that no one can be sure whom to trust.
As the mystery gets resolved, we also get to see Harry Grimm make some surprising new connections in his own life.
Blood Sport is plagued by a few misspellings and typos, but is nevertheless quite enjoyable to read. Only mild cautions.
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.
Carl R. Trueman writes in a debut World Opinion article that Big Tech is working us over and we could barely care less.
“Parents who still think the educational choice they make for their children is the most critical decision they make are sadly mistaken. That they decide whether their children can have smartphones is likely of more importance. “
He doesn’t invoke Neil Postman’s name, but he does repeats ideas I heard from Postman first. We think of technology as assisting us, as doing our bidding, but when we ask our tech what it would like us to do, then we surrender to the tech in our hands and begin to live in a technopoly.
Trueman says technology “mediates reality to us, and in doing so, it reshapes how we imagine the world and our place within it.”
“It is possible, my lord, if your lordship will excuse my saying so, that the liveliness of your lordship’s manner may be misleading to persons of limited—”
“Be careful, Bunter!”
“Limited imagination, my lord.”
“Well-bred English people never have imagination, Bunter.”
“Certainly not, my lord. I meant nothing disparaging.”
I was first introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey through the BBC production of Clouds of Witness (the subject, in its book form, of this review) broadcast on Masterpiece Theatre back in 1973, with the irresistible Ian Carmichael starring. (He didn’t actually resemble the character described in the books, but once seen, he’s impossible to get rid of.)
Clouds of Witness is one of those stories where coincidence and withheld information combine to confuse a fairly simple problem. Lord Peter Wimsey is in Paris, on his way home from a holiday in Corsica, when he learns that his brother Gerald, Duke of Denver, has been arrested for murder.
The fatal events occurred at a hunting lodge in Yorkshire, where the duke and his family and friends were staying. Denis Cathcart, a slightly-too-smooth young gentleman to whom Peter’s sister Mary is engaged, is discovered in the early hours of the morning, shot to death outside the conservatory. Sir Gerald is standing over him.
Mary claims she was awakened by a gunshot, which is a lie, since the shot had been fired more than an hour earlier. Gerald refuses to explain what he was doing outside at that hour.
Sir Gerald’s lawyer, at his client’s wishes, plans to base his defense on reasonable doubt; the gunshot wound could reasonably have been self-inflicted. But Lord Peter, when he shows up, is determined to get past the intersecting lies and discover what really happened. The true murderer must not be allowed to escape. The investigation will lead him to be shot at, to nearly drown in a Yorkshire bog, and to risk his life on a trans-Atlantic airplane flight in a storm (this story is set in 1920, you must remember).
Clouds of Witness is not Dorothy Sayers at the height of her powers, but it’s a fascinating and original detective problem, enjoyable and well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek descriptions of the English nobility and their quaint customs.
“…You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”
“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.”
It had been a while since I’d read any of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books. Two collections showed up at bargain prices on Amazon recently, so I snapped them up. Then I settled down with the first novel, Whose Body? The author was still finding her voice as a mystery writer here, but it’s a very enjoyable read.
Lord Peter Wimsey, if you’re not familiar with him, is an English nobleman, the younger brother of a duke. He suffered “combat fatigue” in World War I, and immediately after was jilted by his fiancée. He took up detecting crime as a sort of therapy hobby, and is good at it. His success is aided by the fact that he looks and acts very much like Bertie Wooster (Ian Carmichael played both roles creditably), so people underestimate him. (His valet Bunter, by the way, is hard to distinguish from Jeeves.)
When the man who is repairing the church roof at the Wimsey ducal estate is detained by the police, the dowager duchess turns to her son Peter to figure out what’s really going on. The poor workman walked into his bathroom one morning and found a dead man in his tub, naked except for a pair of pince nez glasses. Inspector Sugg of Scotland Yard (a stereotypical character whom the author wisely faded out of succeeding books) loses no time arresting the poor man and his housemaid.
Meanwhile, a well-known Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He bore a superficial resemblance to the mysterious body in the bath, but is not the same man.
Lord Peter, assisted by his good friend Inspector Parker, takes advantage of the considerable license the police authorities allow the nobility, and starts his own investigation. It will lead to a horrible discovery and a terrible revelation.
Whose Body? is an enjoyable introduction to a stellar (and groundbreaking) detective series. I was particularly intrigued, on this reading, by certain instances of what today we’d call “cultural stereotypes.” Sir Reuben Levy’s description sounds like a standard, slightly antisemitic trope. But the author is delving deeper. We learn from those who knew him that the man was in fact a capital fellow, and much loved. The same goes for an American character who talks in the kind of broad American accent one sees so often (painfully) in old English books. But again, on getting to know him, we learn he’s an admirable guy. I’ve heard Sayers criticized for “snobbery,” but I think it’s deeper than that. She uses the stereotypes in order to transcend them, and makes a subtextual statement in doing so (Hey! I used subtextual in a sentence!)
I highly recommend Whose Body? Not only is it an intriguing, well-plotted mystery, but there are few literary pleasures that compare with listening to Lord Peter talk piffle.