Humour: It's subjective

Why is it that smart, intelligent professionals cannot fucking send an email without hitting "reply all"? I DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR PIECE OF INFORMATION. SHUT UP AND GET OUT OF MY INBOX YOU INBRED CRETINOUS GNOME.

The new smoking cessation banner ads on Yahoo, the ones with the smoking turkey? Yeah, those make me want to get a carton of Camels and LIGHT UP. I get the pun, okay? I just think it's a STUPID pun.

However. 90% of written or visual humour relies on division by zero to work (in this case, division by zero = slapstick and punning). And there is a REASON that "division by zero" returns a null number, or possibly a black hole. It's not funny.

I used to think that The Sleeper, Woody Allen's movie, was the funniest thing I'd ever seen, in large part because it was about sex. It was possibly even more about sex than Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex. It was also completely slapstick. Oh, not in the Three Stooges (and no, I hate them in fact) sense, but in the "HAHA WE'LL WATCH THIS GUY PET A LARGE BALL THAT MAKES HIM EXPERIENCE ORGASM" sense, which is not really that funny eventually, assuming that your sense of humour makes it out of adolescence.

But so much of humour (at least to me, and I will point out that Your Mileage May Vary, but I expect you all to have mature senses of humour (except for the guys, who we all know are fart-obsessed juvenile delinquents)) is situational. I don't necessarily get off on one-liners, but those rely on context. Otherwise you watch them delivered in a movie and you can never watch the movie again because it's just not funny. So many smartmouthed comebacks rely on the situation as well that you really can't play them off. I think the movies that work best, humour-wise, are the ones where either the humour was unscripted or the riff was funny and left in.

I believe, to take a marvellous example that you have all seen, that this is how POTC was filmed (if it was not, suck it because I don't care). They left in Johnny Depp's extemporaneous comments and it made the movie funny.

POTC2? Not so funny. They tried to script the funny, and they tried to do it by realising that an action sequence - the bit in the blacksmithy - that was supposed to be omgseriousbizness in the first movie was coming off as funny to the audience...so they put that scene on steroids and a waterwheel and let 'er rip for about twenty minutes. Yes, I practically pissed myself laughing, but I wasn't laughing at the scene - I was laughing at Keira Knightley's reaction to it. I also had the clear knowledge that I wasn't laughing because it was FUNNY in the same way as it had been in POTC, I was being manipulated into it.

And they also tried to script Johnny Depp (particularly after leaving him out of the movie for significant chunks of it). Not a good plan.

POTC was hilarious because it was so unexpected. POTC2 was NOT funny because it was scripted to be extemporaneously hilarious. FAIL.

Puns are to written humour as slapstick is to visual humour - in effect as well as in prevalence. And puns are just not funny. They are particularly unfunny if you've read more than a couple of books of the Xanth series (I think I made it up to nine or ten before my brain produced a tiny knife and tried to stab itself to death) and realise that you can squeeze a pun out of ANYTHING if you try hard. Freudian slip and slippers? Funny once. Putting a character in them for most of a book? A lot less funny.

But comedy can come from many sources, and there are genuinely funny works out there that don't rely on puns or slapstick to be funny and still make me nearly cry every time I read/watch them. I am, of course, desperately thinking of an example now and drawing a total blank.

Though I do actually think that, like, Night Watch is genuinely funny, it doesn't make me howl with laughter. Gwen and Cait being hilarious is not likely to be widely known. But in those cases, it's the situation that's funny, and the response to it that's funny - not the puns that can get packed into the damn thing that are funny.

However! Combining puns (the cold turkey) with slapstick (it's smoking) is not the two great tastes that taste great together. It is, instead, a work that makes me want to skin a bitch. Real bad.

But I have known for some time that the anti-smoking councils in America are completely off on the wrong track.

Oh for fuck's sake. Dear professionals! Blowing your nose? Acceptable. Roto-rootering your nose on the other side of the cube wall? NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE. I AM GOING TO LACE YOUR COFFEE WITH DRAIN CLEANER.

*****

Brothers and sisters of the soul unite!

Could you give me a wish if I tell you what I want? / Will the price be no object? / I wish for dreams of light

The hampers are full and our / Laundry's perpetually wet / Think about traveling south / Find the right something / You might have left

If I worked it out right / They won't see me or the gun

Nass Merrakech: Zeye Meyel

Walls

I always THINK that I'm totally not squickable. I mean, I know myself pretty well, I know that I'll try just about anything once, and usually two or three times to make sure I didn't like it the first time. I read voraciously, in many genres, and I pretty much only don't read sports and biographies. I read horror, I read splatterpunk, I read stuff that makes your spine want to crawl out of your body and find a new home, and not because it's badly written. I only don't watch horror movies because I have a morbid imagination and I get nightmares.

Anyone who can get nightmares for a solid week from the ep of Transformers where they brought back Optimus Prime has problems.

I have things I don't like, sure. I don't like mpreg, I don't like badly-written or overdone incest, I don't like women-as-eternal-victims-in-need-of-saving, I don't like plots that involve everyone wilfully not telling anyone in authority what's going on so they can FIX it, I don't like lots of things - but I don't think of those as squicks, any more than I'd think of walking into an ice cream shop(pe) and deciding that I had to leave because I really don't like rum-raisin ice cream (or raisins in general, in fact). It's a like or a dislike, not a squick.

Obviously, if I had once been viciously raped with a carton of rum-raisin ice cream by a hillbilly axe murderer, I might then legitimately have a squick about ice cream.

But I do still think of myself as someone not squicked by sex or violence or language or imagery, and generally when I run up against a wall and find myself going "Oh, yeah, squick, hey," it's a brickwall...topped with razor wire. And patrolled by an Unfriendly Patrol. Armed with guns. And guard dogs.

In other words, when I do find a squick, it usually makes me want to vomit.

So congratulations, person on bad_rpers_suck who has the icon of someone slitting a woman's throat with a straight razor. You've just found a squick of mine.

Thanks. Have some vomit.

And it's not that I'm not into freedom of speech (my inclination to that alternates with my inclination to buy a gun and shoot everyone I disagree with), it's that I'm not into an icon that I have to watch - carefully and repeatedly - to determine that it is, in fact, as disturbing and disgusting as I thought it was. So now I've overconsumed something I never wanted, and maybe it's the fact that I feel a little full of disgusting that is making me want to vomit, but I tell you - that icon's a winner.

In some strange alternate universe where using a graphic murder icon in a community is okay.


ETA: Okay, so it's her eye. How is this different? I don't care how marvellously arty it is, I find it disturbing (though admittedly a lot less so than when I thought they were cutting her throat). I don't like being an icon nazi, but that's REALLY the sort of thing best left in a personal journal.