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.
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 on having his Chinese dad as a substitute teacher
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:
The new guy speaks frankly to grade schoolers.
Your dad is your substitute teacher.
The experienced or worldly shoots the dreams of the idealists.
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.
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.
