My honors students in the humor theory class are writing right now in response to an intentionally vague prompt: "What is humor for?" It's not a graded essay; I just want to see where their writing skills are, how they organize ideas, what kind of work they can produce in 30 minutes without advance preparation.
But I'm also interested in their answers. I've taught variations on this humor theory class three or four times and every time I hope students will come to some understanding of the function of humor in human societies, but let's face it: I'd be hard pressed to answer the question myself. What is humor for? Does it confer some sort of survival advantage for the species? If some strange cataclysm somehow wiped out the human capacity for humor, what would happen? How long could the human race survive without fart jokes?
This semester we'll read a variety of humorous essays and essays on humor, many of them shockingly unfunny, and we'll discuss a variety of approaches to answering the question. First, though, we have to ask the question. What is humor for?
You've got thirty minutes, starting now.
5 comments:
In response to your title...I'd rather not! I'm a sucker for a good fart joke. : )
I yearn for a world without fart jokes. Or even just greeting cards without fart jokes...
A worse problem would be a world without farts. Everyone would explode.
I was reminded of your blog entry on the purpose of humor when I read from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals tonight. She writes about Abraham Lincoln’s nature, the curious mix of melancholy and humor. “Humor” me by allowing this long quote:
“Melancholy,” writes the modern novelist Thomas Pynchon, “is a far richer and more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a sense of humor.” And, as everyone connected with Lincoln testified, he was an extraordinarily funny man. “When he first came among us,” wrote a Springfield friend, “his wit & humor boiled over.” When he told his humorous stories, Henry Whitney marveled, “he emerged from his cave of gloom and came back, like one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived, again.” His storytelling, Speed (Lincoln’s best friend) believed, was “necessary to his very existence – Most men who have been great students such as he was in their hours of idleness have taken to the bottle, to cards or dice – He had no fondness for any of these – Hence he sought relaxation in anecdotes.” Lincoln himself recognized that humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he explained, so he did not weep. He saw laughter as the “joyous, universal evergreen of life.” His stories were intended “to whistle off sadness.”
Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to bear what is too terrible to be borne,” writes George Valliant. “Humor can be marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our pretentions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way would be corrosive.”
Who of us is a Lincoln? (I wonder if he told fart jokes . . . I hope he told fart jokes.) Nevertheless, it certainly resonates with me that humor is a survival tactic – to combine two thoughts above, an outlet for feeling necessary to existence.
Excellent food for thought. My humor class will eventually be reading an essay arguing that humor indeed evolved as a survival tactic, which suggests that all those personal ads insisting on the importance of a good sense of humor are somehow essential to the survival of the species.
Post a Comment