Comedy

When I think about comedy, I first think of a few of my favorite funny movies. Two of my most favorite are Zoolander and Keeping Mum. Keeping Mum is a dark comedy about a family whose new housekeeper is both (secretly) the family matron’s mother and a murderer. The title refers both to the concept of keeping your mother as a guest and “keeping mum” or keeping quiet about family secrets. Some of the characteristics of this comedy are morose humor dealing with death, murder, and insanity and sexual humor, especially as the father of the family, a vicar, explores the Song of Solomon in a new light.

Zoolander has somewhat less of what I would call more intellectual humor and more outright humor. There’s physical humor, displayed in the walk-off between Owen Wilson’s and Ben Stiller’s characters; situational humor, displayed in these characters’ difficulties in attempting to extract information from “inside” a computer; and verbal humor, especially when Zoolander (Ben Stiller) ponders what life would be like if he were not “really really really ridiculously good looking.” (The words alone here do not do the scene justice when lacking the odd accent Ben Stiller adopts for the entire movie.)

One thing I find about comedy, however, is that it is unpleasant to examine. I believe that examining humor devalues it just in the same way that explaining a joke automatically decreases it’s humor value.