Funny

There are two kinds of people in the world. You are either one type or the other. There are no gray areas. You are either type F or type L and there is no room for interpretation. You must accept this binary logic. You are under my power; you are getting very sleepy. Perhaps there is some room for gray areas, but in general, you are either Funny (that would be your type F), or you are Laughing (that would be your type L).

Since I follow the F path, I am acutely aware of how hard it is to be funny. Imagine sitting down to write about humor and thinking "I better have something funny to say, or this is going to suck." Funny doesn't work under pressure - funny works best from the spur of the moment; the off hand comment, the wry remark, the witty retorte. I thought about inserting humor randomly into the column (random is good, it's spontaneous, of a sort.)

An old man goes up to an old woman in a nursing home. "Do you know who I am?" he half-shouts self importantly. "No," she replies, "but go up to the nurses station and they will tell you."

That's taking a big risk though - not everyone will like the joke (or perhaps even get it), and of course there are always those that you offend. This joke offends old people, who are of course not all senile or forgetful. The point of this exercise is not to offend but to educate. The process (F) of making jokes and the process of enjoying them (proces L) differ as much as it takes different skills to make a good chocolate cake than to eat it. To understand or develop these skills, go and watch David Letterman's monologue, but try not to laugh (some nights, this is easier than others.) Instead of exhibiting type L behavior, be an "F" for a bit. See the table to help guide you:

If the joke is about: watch out a reference to:
sex and/or athletes Madonna
unusual hair Donald Trump
ineptitude George W. Bush

You can make your own list. Write down the theme and the reference, and take your scorecard out the next night. I don't mean to imply that Dave and his writers aren't funny or original. They entertain me. I Tivo the show nightly and try to watch at least the monologue the next day. And, since I consider myself a type F, I think I know how difficult it is to create jokes out of whole cloth. I imagine that they sit in a room and bounce ideas around and generally commit acts of immaturity until they come up with something original and witty, but that half the battle becomes "how the hell can we tell if this is funny after trying to invent hundreds of jokes and shooting rubber bands at each other."

While the job of comedy writer must be much less strenous than window washer in the financial district or bike messenger or prison guard, it must be a challenge. Those reading this who have extensive mileage will remember Rob Petrie trying to herd Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie so that they could write funny skits for Rob Reiner.

They must have a solution for my conundrum - "they" being the people who work in a successful comedy writing room - because they generally produce funny material and I am assuming that the people producing it are of type F. In other words, they are all trying to make each other laugh, and none of them has the type L genes, so they aren't laughing at each other. They must have a way to know (or guess) when it is good enough.

What exactly is it that us type Fs are doing that keeps us from laughing?

Note that I am excluding from this behavioral observation people who don't have a sense of humor. You don't have to laugh at Benny Hill slapping a bald guy on the top of the head, or at Marty Feldman telling Gene Wilder "what hump" in Young Frankenstein - you just need to have something that tickles your fancy.

An old man goes up to an old woman in a nursing home. "I am in great shape. Do you know how old I am?"he bellows. "I can guess your age," she says, "just by holding your elbow." "Really?" he says and offers his elbow. She holds it for a bit and says, "You are 82." "That's amazing," he proclaims, "you really did that by holding my elbow?" "No," she says, "you told me your age yesterday."

So what are the type F's up to when the humor is flying and they are not laughing? Obviously, they are trying to come up with their own jokes. But it is more than that...they are the visionaries, first anticipating your joke to figure out where it will go. And then, trying to think what will the next step be - where can one go next? And will that be funny? Or just bad taste? Or plain old weird? There are a lot of choices to make. For example, the elbow joke above does not include the elbow. It includes a different body part which could make it much funnier and quite a bit naughtier. Does including that body part in a family-read column like this one cause a problem? Is the joke still funny without the correct body part?

There is no way to retell the joke; the cat is out of the bag (or more correctly, the fly has been zipped.) In a nutshell (no pun intended) that is the challenge for the type F viewpoint. You only have one chance to get it right, or you are stuck with the humiliation, embarassment and worst of all - silence.

Today's thoughts are dedicated to my very funny sister in law Sabine and her daughter Heidi who actually made me laugh.