note: all
jokes in this series were thought up by the author (unless you don't like them,
then it was someone else).
I sometimes wonder about this question. Sometimes I wonder
it after making a joke that I myself don't find funny but know others will, or
after seeing the latest and greatest attempt at shock humour, or even for that
matter when someone tells a good one-liner. On the flipside, I also think about
what doesn't constitute humour.
 |
"No it's not the
front cover of The Daily Express, Madeleine gives the same number fucks about
the Express as the number of times she's been found".
|
Take the above caption, I find it funny, but I know a number
of others will not for various reasons, be it because they think it is sick and
shouldn't be joked about, because they read the Express and enjoy it's 'style'
(hahahahahahahaha), or because they think it's just immature and not worthy of
laughs. I think a limitation of this piece will be that ultimately, a sense of
humour is subjective and as such, I can't really come down on succinct rules on
what is and isn't humour.
I think to start with we can generalise and say that a
medium for humour does not have a bearing on how funny it is. For instance,
drawings and cartoons are not always funnier than spoken jokes which are not
always funnier than purely written jokes which are not always funnier than
physical jokes. I'm not talking about an individual joke as such, for instance
the joke "There are 10 people in this world, those that understand binary,
and those that don't." only works in written forms, as it is impossible to
construe the double meaning of 10 in different bases through spoken words
without giving the joke away.
 |
| Contained in this
picture are 2 of the 5 total stories that the express can do, the other 3 being
Madeline McCann, immigrants and every day items that kill you. |
The next topic that comes up is what is humour? As before we
can agree what something that's humourous actually is, we need to know what
something humourous will do. For instance if the topic were "what
constitutes pain?" then we might define pain as something that physically
hurts, then find things that hurt people in that respect. This definition
however would rule out emotional pain, which is also valid pain. So back to
humour; how should we define it? We could say that it's something that makes
you laugh, but laughter can be forced and that doesn't account for the so
called terrible jokes like "Q: Why can't you tell jokes about garden
borders? A: They're o-fense-ive" which might get a groan but are still
enjoyed and classed as jokes. At the same time though we can't go too vague
either by saying that something that is funny gets a reaction, as a bad
reaction would not be the sign of something funny. I thought at one point that
humour is something that either gets a laugh or is understood as being
perceivably funny, but that leaves out sarcasm, which while being low on the
wit ladder is still on said ladder and must be accommodated for.
Oxford dictionary says "The quality of being amusing or
comic". Wikipedia says "Humour is the tendency of
particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement."
They paraphrase one another and we've spent long enough on this to just go with
these definitions and allow exceptions if and when needed.
So that's humour defined, we'll get into the topic itself next time.