Funny Or Die

Somebody once said "All humor is anarchic."

Indeed, what makes something funny? My Philo prof taught us that humor is triggered by absurdity - the dissonance between "what is" and "what should be." Which must be why I find pratfalls intrinsically and helplessly entertaining: because upright two-legged apes shouldn't fall. But they do, and often with hilarious results:

Okay, she wasn't really blind; just playing Helen Keller.

Now, just like the Janus Masks , there is a fine line between comedy and tragedy. Even though we I may laugh at events that cause actual physical injury to the subjects, it is the degree of injury - barring death, of course, which is seldom funny - plus the amount of time elapsed since the incident occurred that makes it fine to laugh at something. Case in point, below:

That's Canadian skater Jessica Dube, who got hit by her partner's ice skates during a competition in Colorado in 2007. She had to have surgery to her left cheek and nose, but suffered no broken bones and survived to skate another day.

That was so not funny.

But now that you know she's all right, and it being three years later, see how you feel about the same event - but this time set to music and sound effects:

You've heard about Gallows Humor, right? Basically, it's finding amusement even in the face of something most of humanity finds the most terrifying thing of all: death. Particularly, one's own.

In his 1927 essay Humour (Der Humour), Freud theorized about gallows humor:

"The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure."


Denial? Nah, that's a river in Egypt.

Puns aside, Oscar Wilde, that great gay hero, was a pundit to the end. Fallen from grace, destitute, and dying of cerebral meningitis in some dingy Parisian room plastered with what must have been hideously tacky decor, he is famously said to have remarked "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."

And then he died.

I don't know if Wilde had specified it in his will, but even his headstone in Pere Lachaise speaks of a sense of humor :

According to Wiki :

"The modernist angel depicted as a relief on the tomb was originally complete with male genitals which were broken off and kept as a paperweight by a succession of cemetery keepers; their current whereabouts are unknown."

Hm - gallows humor and a dick joke, too!

Now, we find humor in movies that use death and funerals as take-off points. Case in point: Soxy Topacio's Ded Na Si Lolo, which I must confess I haven't had the pleasure of watching, so I don't know if it featured that Pinoy staple of horrifically-amusing goings-on at a funeral - like this incident in Romania :

I gasped, then I howled at that video because it reminded me of a TRUE incident that happened when we were laying my grandfather down to his final earthly resting place. After a very formal and somber ceremony, dear old gramps' coffin was being lowered into the ground, as the female members of my clan started sobbing softly (my histrionic grand-aunt was absent, thankfully.) At that precise moment, my cellphone beeped, and fool that I was, I actually looked at the message.

It was my best friend, who had texted this :

So, kumusta naman ang libing?

Successful ba?

Needless to say, I burst out laughing. Luckily, I was enough of an actor to quickly mask my guffaws to approximate something of a howling sob, thus escaping the ghoulish fate of being hurled into the pit by my glaring kinsmen to keep granddad company.

Of course, religion isn't spared from humor, although fanatics are often marked by their general humorlessness. Although they can sometimes be inadvertently laughable - like, oh, televangelists, Sarah Palin, and incompetent Nigerian bombers - I've never met an intentionally- funny zealot, except perhaps in The Naked Gun movies.

Perhaps the lack of a sense of humor has a correlation to the propensity to impose one's religious and/or political views on others, and judge them accordingly and, need it be said, harshly. Maybe Freud was on to something in his Relief Theory, where he stated that :

"there are powerful censors in the mind that form unconscious barriers to prevent us thinking about 'forbidden thoughts.' In this view, the laughable (ideally, a naughty joke) liberates the laugher from inhibitions about forbidden thoughts and feelings. The result is a discharge of nervous energy that distracts the inner censor from what is going on. Freud suggests that the release of this energy is a pleasurable experience as demonstrated by the good feeling that laughter provides."

Moreover:

"In his view, jokes happen when the conscious allows forbidden thoughts which society suppresses. The superego allows the ego to generate humor. A benevolent superego allows a light and comforting type of humor while a harsh superego creates a biting and sarcastic type of humor. A very harsh superego suppresses humor all together. Freud's humor theory was based on the dynamic among id, ego, and superego. The commanding superego will impede the ego to continue its pleasure-seeking from the id, or to momentarily adapt itself to  the demands of reality. Moreover Freud also contributes to the development of the relief theory of laughter in which he proposed that emotional energy is released by humor sense. 

Later Freud returned his attention to humor noting that not everyone is capable of formulating humor."

Then again, zealots and fanatics DO have minds that are closed as tightly as a fist, which isn't good for anything but knocking things down.

And speaking of knockdowns, I present to you a remix of that Pope-Tackling affair just late last year. For the record, I didn't find the incident hilarious - at first. But once it was established that The Ratz was fine and that the Empire was still solidly in his clutches hands, well, all bets were off.

Thus, see His Holiness and his biggest fan tussling to the music of that glorious internet sensation Keyboard Cat :

What does one's sense of humor say about one's self? I suppose it indicates one's view of the world, one's take on life. I think the human condition is generally ridiculous, and choose to laugh at its many and varied absurdities. Others may opt for a different route, and rail bitterly at life's slings and arrows.

Whatever tickles your fancy, fellas.

In his Incongruity Theory, Kant weighs in on the role of incongruity in humor :

"In everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing."


Basically, we're supposed to find it funny when an expectation (a strained one, no less) comes to nothing. Which should be something we keep in mind the next time we expect lovers to make us happy. 

Buuuutttttttt I digress...

Since humor is based on cognitive shifts triggered by surprise deviations from expected patterns of reality, I suppose my own warped sense of it means that I actually have a very realistic view of life in general, and enough fortitude to laugh when it confounds my expectations. Or ironically, do I laugh because life delivers the absurdities I've learned to expect from it?


Then again, maybe I'm just a sick, sick boy.


All I know is if you didn't at the very least titter at one of the videos above, we can't be real friends.


Which, I guess, is how it should be. But hey, that's life. For me, it's often a toss-up between being an Ingmar Bergman film and a Tex Avery cartoon.

You can focus on the tragic:

Or see the comic in things :

Me, I'll take life as a cartoon any day - pratfalls, falling anvils, rocket-powered coyotes and all.

Aaaaannnddddd one more for the road:

Oh, and before you slap me - yes, I'm 12.

And when life slaps you - slap back.

Slap it silly.