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.