Funny Ha Ha

A little while ago Greg wrote a blog entry about how "women aren't funny." Apart from being absurdly reductionist, not to mention other things ending with "-ist", this assertion has caused the idea of what is funny and what isn't to bounce around in my head for the last week or so. I watched the end of "She's the Man" on TV again and laughed at Amanda Bynes (cf: debutante luncheon in which she eats a drumstick like a neandrathal and excuses herself by getting up and saying "Ladies." out the corner of her meat-filled mouth and stomping away). I re-read the 2nd Bridget Jones book (cf: describing a fussy toddler as "writhing like a deportee" and the scene where this kid sneezes snot all over himself and his sister reacts by vomiting on Bridget's head). These things were funny to the point of making me laugh loudly while alone, which is a pretty high level of funniness. (Also: it seems like I'm way into gross humor?) A lot of the stuff on icanhazcheezburger makes me laugh, especially this one.

But there's a lot of stuff out there manufactured to be funny that isn't. When discussing the humor issue, Greg asked me to name funny women that we knew and then we tried to name anyone funny that we knew. We couldn't really name anyone. I think this is for several reasons, the most significant being that real life is pretty different from entertainment. There are people I know who consider themselves funny, and they are sometimes, but they are also really annoying sometimes. For someone to be funny all the time, in real life, I think they'd have to be kind of an idiot and not really your friend. Who's consistently funny? The rotund, heavy-breathing accountant at the real estate company I used to work for, but not because he was meaning to be. Also: the drug-addled hippies I used to sell ferry boat tickets to who would get out of their VW buses without putting it in park first and be rummaging in the back while it was putt-putting away from the booth. But these people are funny because they are not real people to me, which is part of what makes things funny in an entertainment context. The famous Mel Brooks quote on tragedy vs. comedy is that when I walk down the street and fall into a manhole, it's tragedy, but when you do it, it's comedy.

Last night I saw a sketch comedy show, some of which wasn't very funny (perhaps partly,in a tragically ironic twist, because of the desperate strain on the part of some performers to be funny). The best part of one act's shtick was a Lewis and Clark skit in which the Clark guy eats a sandwich that was obviously pranked by his comedy partner and full of rocks or possibly cat litter. Sadly, he did not capitalize on this genuinely funny (and real) problem, not even with a throwaway line, but ditched the sandwich and moved on with the script. A comedy tragedy.

So people trying to be funny = not funny. People trying to be funny all the time = not funny. People falling into manholes = funny. More on this difficult equation later.