What is Funny?by Virtudes Rojas What makes something funny? A good question, isn’t it? People have asked that question for decades. It’s hard to identify what makes something funny, even though we all seem to have a basic consensus on what funny is:
The reason I know about the last requirement is that I am a real live grade school teacher. I don’t find it particularly consoling that I know I’m not supposed to be funny. I make lame attempts to make the students laugh anyway. Kinda like Ahab chasing the Great White Whale. Even though I know I won’t catch what I’m after, I’ve signed on for the humiliation all the same. Either a joke goes over their heads (easy when you’re ten), or I tell it wrong (I have the comedic timing of a White House Press Secretary at wartime) or it’s just that generation gap rearing its ugly head. I just know that like Al Gore, I’m perceived as a serious, studious intellectual-type who does not appreciate the necessity to let loose and laugh it up. Oh, if only. If only those kids saw my life. If they saw the books in my house that approach the ceiling in perilous towers like some looming Leaning Tower of Pisa… and knew that the bottom one always has the information I want… and knew that I was actually foolish enough to think I could lift the others… If they saw me with my cat, Pounce de Leon, the wickedest creature of God’s Own Creation, right when I think I’m making him happy… and I lean down to nuzzle him and… well, it’s just too painful to talk about it here. Let’s just say my plastic surgeon can call his kids’ orthodontist and assure him those braces are bought and paid for. If they saw my ridiculous attempts to learn Southern cooking (I just put that white gravy on it, y’all) or to do whatever it is I’m supposed to do at one of these Southern BBQ’s without making a complete tomato-slime mess of myself… Well then they might think I was almost funny. Almost. Then again, it might not. After all, since I deal daily with kids, I think this is a great way to conclude, and be funny at the same time: “Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose with the exception of guppies, who like to eat theirs.” P. J. O'Rourke |
