I received an email from my dad today. He's 80 which means he and his friends have way too much time, and are still mesmerized by email. He must get 50 jokes a day, and he dutifully filters them and sends me the only ones he thinks I'll like.
The email had the subject "Symptoms of Mad Cow Disease", and was photo of a buff, rippled guy taking off his towel and exposing 4 shlongs to his doctor. Dad thought it was so funny, he actually called me to make sure I had received it. Ok. It was mildly amusing, but am I out of step? I just didn't think it was THAT funny. (And NO, I'm not going to put it up on a website so you can look at it.)
It set me to thinking... what is it with humour, that makes something riotously funny to one, yet lame, or worse, even insulting to another?
Is it generational? Not entirely. Dad and I have been known to enjoy a joke or two together and most of the stuff he forwards is worthy, so I thought I'd look a little further.
Is it "class"? (Dare I use that word in this neuvo egalitarian world?). If you believe TV sitcoms, trailer trash think anything involving a bodily function, and especially a fart, is a riot, but some of my friends think that's funny too.
Is it cultural or national? Of course different countries have differing humour, but humour can also cross borders. Take the Danes for example. Now there's a people who can enjoy a joke, so much so that they named the highest point in Denmark "Himmelbjerget", or "The Sky Mountain". It's a towering 147 metres (482ft above) sea level.
There's a picture of Sky Mountain HERE, captioned as "The Frightening and Very Impressive North Face of Himmelbjerget", but if you don't get why calling it "Sky Mountain" is funny, then you won't get the rest of the site either.
It's a mystery to me. Really. Humour is universal, in that there's not a people on the planet who don't have something they think is funny, but what's funny to them probably isn't going to be funny to me, and even worse, what's funny to me today will probably be just plain bland in a few years.
By co-incidence, while I'm typing this, "Team America - World Police" is on cable in the background. Bloody hillarious, but my partner, Dr J just doesn't get it. Why? "Because it's not funny", she said as she wandered past my desk. Yes it is!
She says the same about my all time favourite movie, "Flying High" (or "Airplane" in the US, Canada and some other less interesting places). Surely Flying High/Airplane just has to be in the list of top 5 funniest films ever made.
Humour. How would I know?
5 comments:
I don't find Airplane too funny. I thing the writing is too literal. How about smart comedy?
Again, I think that might be a generational thing. Actually, in Airplane, the writing isn't really literal at all. Yes, if you just watch it like any other movie, then it's corny slapstick, but it's such a beautiful parody of those awful "Airport" movies of the '70s. Our local cable company actually played Airport 77 and Airplane one after the other a few weekends ago. The scripts were, in parts, line for line identical.
Second, it's not what's being said or done that's funny (after all, it's a parody of an allegedly serious disaster movie), it's what's happening in the background... like the titles of the magazines on the rack, or the photographs on the offie wall.
For smart comedy, my absolute favourite is Wag The Dog, which is really a documentary, and ought to be compulsory study in the Harvard MPA. But many of my friends don't get it. I suspect that unless you have a little inside knowledge of how TV and/or politics and/or advertising actually works, it's going to go a little over your head.
Christopher Guest's Best In Show and Waiting for Guffman mockumentaries are also master works, but once again, I suspect they don't appeal to a really wide audience.
Shrek is smart, mainly because it reaches to people at so many levels.
Shrek 1 is more universal, and any children's film that can get away with calling it's main evil character "fuck wad" without anyone really noticing has to be doing something right.
However Shrek 2's ride through Beverly Hills is priceless.
While we're on animation, Nick Park's Creature Comforts is brilliant, as was Chicken run, right up until the very last scene when the ONLY line they could have used should have been "Get off my plane" They didn't use it and for me, that spoiled the film.
In written comedy, Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide cleverly uses irony, but without doubt the master of the genre is Terry Pratchett in his discworld series. Partchett's use of language and double meaning is sophisticated and savvy.
Also try Tom Holt's The Walled Orchard, set in ancient Athens. It made me laugh.
For non fiction, I can't go past PJ O'Rourke, and in particular, Parliament of Whores and Eat The Rich. His insights into the frailties of our world should also be compulsory study in Harvard's MPA.
I was weaned not on mother's milk or Gerber's peaches, but on "Strange Brew" and "Better Off Dead."
I can never understand or be understood by normal folk ever in my life.
Comedy. It's a beast.
My father found Airplane funny. That is his kind of film. Comedy is in the ear of the beholder.
I enjoyed I heart Huckabees.
Ah, dear Chester. Methinks comedy is not only generational, but also cultural and environmental and somewhat habitual.
I was bought up on Aunty Jack, Monty Python and The Goodies on ABC telly. Movies came later, and when they did, I found feature length comedies rigidly dull. My brain was pre-MTV sound bytes and just couldn't go the distance.
The only fick which finally hit my funny bone was Dodgeball. I didn't get Something About Mary, or Flying High but I DID get Wag the Dog (thanks!) and I DID get Withnail & I ... but I wouldn't classify them as 'comedies'. I'd put them in the genius category. Clever, witty, smart. Dodgeball was dumb 13 year old geek boy humour, but funny and silly and (being American) somewhat moralistic.
As for Chicken Run et al - I can't do animation, stop motion, claymation kinda flicks with much success. I tried with Toys but I couldn't relate to 2-D figurines doing superhuman impossible things. They're just not 'real' somehow. Ditto Shrek - altho that was blindingly well written.
Perhaps it's a left brain right brain environmentally habit comfort kind of thing. That which we grew up with helps build happy neural pathways and etc. Know what I mean?
Post a Comment