What's So Funny?

A person's sense of humor can reveal a tremendous amount about his or her perspective. What one laughs at exposes much more than either the individual or a casual observer may realize. I laugh, or at least smile, at a tremendous amount of jokes, incidents, ideas, and sketches. These all share common elements, including creativity and intelligence. My sense of humor often reflects my values, my attitudes towards society, and my love of the absurd.

For me to find an idea humorous, it must possess some degree of creativity and intelligence. I love cleverness, especially plays on words and ideas. Contrasting and twisting familiar concepts especially amuses me. For example, one day I amused myself by imagining, "What if the band Cake consisted of instrument-playing pastries?" Even my affinity for terrible puns bases itself in intellect. Although they may seem dumb at first glance, plays on words require intelligence to understand. Even very basic puns call for the listener to recognize a reference or double meaning of a word. However, intelligence flounders without creativity. All of the cleverness in the world cannot replace a unique thought.

This essential combination of intelligence and creativity highlights a major difference between Kevin Smith's Clerks and the film Scary Movie. While I found Clerks hysterically funny, I desperately wanted my money back after paying to watch Scary Movie. In Clerks, Kevin Smith broke all of the rules of traditional filmmaking with his talky characters that work in a convenience store. Using coarse humor and the characters' bizarre small talk, he commented on modern society's foibles. Meanwhile, Scary Movie's filmmakers tried far too hard to make the audience laugh. The movie's jokes fell flat not because they used obscenity, but because they relied on clichés. Its embrace of stereotypes led to the same characters and situations seen in hundreds of other movies. Scary Movie brought nothing new and certainly nothing intelligent to humor, resulting in a very unfunny movie. These films differed not in their form of coarse humor, but in how they used that particular form.

Much of my humor draws on a mocking attitude. I particularly appreciate humor that mocks society, either indirectly or directly.

Indirect mockery often rebels against society's norms. This type of humor addresses taboo subjects and scorns societal restrictions. I enjoy my friend Mark's coarse humor and obscene gestures because they go against what society finds normal and right. A form of incongruity, the jokes surprise and offend people. Even when it no longer shocks, his humor evokes a sense of embracing something forbidden. Black humor takes a similar standpoint. By poking fun at death, one mocks something sacred.

Direct mockery comes in the forms of parody and satire among others. While parody generally focuses on one individual target, satire typically addresses societal issues. Both forms attempt to point out the flaws in the idea or subject they ridicule. As parody, Saturday Night Live's "Celebrity Jeopardy" portrays celebrities as perverts and morons, forcing them below the audience. It also ridicules game shows, exposing these programs' inanity. As satire, it mocks our culture for idolizing and venerating these celebrities. Although I think these sketches do not fulfill their comic potential, I often find them pretty amusing. With fake news articles, the satirical webzine The Onion ridicules our society. It mocks the media, business, government, and mindless drones who give into popular culture's pressures and demands. This humor appeals to me since I hold a level of contempt for much of modern society, especially its materialism and conformity. Even though I sometimes fall prey to society's pressures, I attempt to raise myself above it through mockery. While both satire and parody utilize superiority theory, satire ridicules society in an attempt to better it. Although I like parodies, satire's combined scorn and corrective purpose hold greater appeal to me.

Although I hate to admit it, I sometimes laugh at individual people, particularly if I perceive them as less moral or intelligent than myself. I like to believe that I respect and love all people. However, that illusion often crumbles when a situation ripe for me to prove my superiority presents itself. Despite my better intentions, I often find myself using humor to raise my status and lower other people's.

I sometimes turn my derisive humor on myself. At times, I tend to act ditzy or dumb. I use these incidents as opportunities for self-deprecating humor. Another use of superiority theory, self-deprecating humor both lowers and raises the status of the humorist. When I use it, I lower myself by admitting to my own foolishness. However, at the same time, I demonstrate that I understand the idiocy of my own actions. I unconsciously attempt to raise my status by proving that I recognize my flaws, rather than just ignorantly bumbling through life.

I also enjoy humor that utilizes incongruity theory. This type of humor often uses a great deal of exaggeration, contrast, and absurdity. For example, my friends and I find entertainment in B-movies. We force ourselves to watch the worst movies we can find and derive humor from endlessly mocking them. These movies' ludicrousness forms the basis for our amusement. These films exaggerate to the extreme, with multiple endings and bizarrely stereotyped characters. They feature dreadful special effects and an abundance of overacting. Despite these faults, it seems that the people involved in making these movies took their jobs very seriously. The tremendous contrast between the filmmakers' attitude and these movies' atrociousness transforms these films from simply bad movies into true B-movies. In addition to incongruity, my friends and I employ superiority theory as we make fun of these movies. We see ourselves as superior to the filmmakers, since their inflated egos led them to believe that their obviously terrible movie would provide viewers with a worthwhile cinematic experience.

Lastly, I love family humor and group in-jokes. In my family, a few jokes have been passed down through several generations - my mother heard them from my great-grandfather and told them to me. I enjoy these jokes not because they hold any inherent humor or particular significance, but merely because they inherit a place in my family's traditions. My fondness for these jokes reflects how strongly I value both tradition and family. Similarly, an in-joke within a group of friends depends not so much on the joke itself, but on the communal atmosphere and shared experiences it evokes. Incidents become much funnier when remembered in a group context. In-jokes often create a wall separating who belongs in a group and who does not. However, unlike many groups, my friends always propagate our in-jokes, sharing them with anyone willing to listen. For us, the telling itself enhances the humor, adding another mythical layer to fairly ordinary incidents or jokes.

If someone based his or her opinion of me on my sense of humor, he or she would probably see a creative, carefree individual with a slightly superior attitude. The casual observer might find me either intelligent or ignorant, depending on the situation. My self-deprecating and superiority theory humor reveals my erratic tendency to swing between high and low self-esteem. Laughter discloses my conflict of values, between purity and obscenity, between light and dark. I laugh at many jokes that I myself would never dare to say. In humor, as in most other types of communication, what a person does not say often reveals just as much as what he or she does say.

Humor serves many purposes in my life. When I feel depressed or lonely, laughing raises my spirits. With relief theory, I use humor to deal with difficult issues. Although I feel more comfortable than ever talking about sex, I still often laugh when discussing it. My laughter helps me relieve anxiety about the subject. I also use humor to alleviate stress accumulated during the day. Every day after finishing classes, I read the comics in the Cornell Daily Sun. Humor helps me relate to others. My friends' collective bizarre sense of humor brought us together and connected us. My sense of humor even plays a part in my romantic life. Although I adore many of my boyfriend's attributes, his never-failing ability to make me laugh strengthens my love in a way few other things can. Ultimately, my sense of humor brings me joy. Combined with other complimentary perspectives, it helps me view the world in a lighter way, to see a reality not totally marred by darkness.

All of these elements combine into my sense of humor, a complex, flexible instrument. Even the basic concepts described cannot fully encompass my entire sense of humor. Too many exceptions to any rules exist to sort everything I find amusing into a few categories. My sense of humor constantly evolves and changes, depending on the situation and my current state of emotion. As I learn new information and gain fresh perspectives, it accommodates those shifts. My sense of humor ultimately provides me with an outlet for a variety of emotions and a method of dealing with this chaotic world.

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