Not A Blog™

I come to notice that, as of late, my writing has been more bitter and less funny. Then again, maybe that’s how I intended it to be. Maybe I just want you to take me seriously.

I don’t know when this particular stigma appeared, but someone needs to stand up and take a stand, instead of standing around, because I won’t stand for it. I’m looking around in the stands… no one? Fine. This is my site anyway; I’ll take the stand.[*]

Why is humor taken less seriously than seriousness? Seriously. You can make your jokes and have your fun, but at the end of the day, that’s sophomoric. It doesn’t really count. With this in mind, I put forth my theory of human existence.

We live in two worlds: the world of humor, and the serious world. The world of humor isn’t even our entertainment; it’s not even necessarily stuff that’s fun. It’s the stuff that makes us laugh. It doesn’t matter if it aids learning, or highlights some absurdity that should be changed; it occupies a the humor niche in our lives and remains separate from the serious world.

The serious world doesn’t need explaining. You don’t want to hear about it anyway. It’s the world you go through when you have to be serious, which is nearly all the time. If you’re like me—well, if you’re like me, I’m sorry to hear that. What I mean to say is: if you’re like most people, you try to sneak back to the humor world while existing in the serious, but it’s never the same.

I think, too often, the humor world is seen as the way to escape the real world. That is, the serious world is pretty messed up, but we’re not allowed to laugh about it because it’s the serious world. We go home and collect in the funny world and it’s hilarious and everyone has a good time. But woe to the man who tries to combine the two. He’s just doesn’t take things seriously. Probably needs to see a quack. So because it’s seen as an escape, rather than a tool, humor is that thing that stays over there, and you don’t talk about it to some people because it’s not polite.

Well, screw that.

I think it’s high time that humor be recognized as a form of legitimate discourse. The biggest problem with this is that humor is largely subjective, so what some people find funny, others find lame, and what others find funny, still others find offensive, and so on. But even then, you can recognize the ridiculousness that the humor is attempting to highlight, even if the joke isn’t particularly funny. (Note that I find the entire circumstance of people being offended by humor, hilarious.)

The point is, I see no reason why comedy should not influence decision making processes or points of view. Often, the very reason something is funny is the same reason you shouldn’t be buying into it in the first place. The cognitive dissonance created at being exposed to absurdities, paradox, and outright lies is evidenced by the act of laughing. In a very real sense, this is a kind of spasm of the brain, where no rationalization can happen in light of conflicting evidence of sorts. It’s generally manifested in two ways: anger which is good inasmuch as it protects one from harm, but bad when it interferes with civil rationale, and laughter, which is good as long as the lesson isn’t ignored.

And if there’s one thing the serious world has in overabundance, it’s absurdities, paradoxes, and outright lies. But seeing as how we live the majority of our life in the serious world where lessons learned from the funny world are inapplicable due to their nature of being “not serious”, we don’t see change as a result of comedians.

Since this is the case, the laughter we experience every day is a hollow sort of “what could be” feeling because we know, deep down inside, it can’t have any jurisdiction on how we live our lives. This re-enforces the stigma of laughter as an embarrassing thing, and the serious world becomes more ridiculous.

So what do I conclude from this line of very serious reasoning? The answer is simple: I will only vote for people who are good at telling jokes.

-Ted

[* Editors note: stand jokes went out of style in 2000, when Fatal Killings was released. Return]