"What is Time?"

When trying to define comedy or what makes something funny, there are many things that can be taken into concideration.  I personally think something can only be comedic or funny if the audience it is directed at thinks it is.  A group of teenagers watching a “comedy” movie could react completely different from a group of older adults watching the same flick.  The comedy we experience This brings me to the point of what determines if something is actually funny.  For something to be funny, I believe it has to get someone to laugh out loud and depending on how funny it is to the person, the length and intesity of the persons laughter shows how funny it was to them.

I think the root of humor comes from an expectation that is unfulfilled. I have absolutely no research to back this up, so I am merely speaking from a stream of thought. It seems like the mind has certain expectations for every speaker and every human for that matter. When someone or something fails to meet those expectations, that’s what leads to laughter.  Humor can take many forms, but from what I can tell, it seems to take an idea that is simple and applicable to the audience and it combines it with a completely unexpected detail. The presentation of an idea and detail catches the audience off guard which seems to trigger a reaction of laughter.

For example, when someone tells a knock-knock joke, the first few lines are relatively expected. “Knock-knock” “Who’s there?” Here, nothing unexpected arises until the initial idea is revealed: “Little old lady.” At this point, there are many questions arising in the mind of the audience. They can only draw conclusions on things they already have thought about before such as a grandmother or a fairy tale character. They are now in a state of curiosity and or have given the idea very little thought. They respond “Little old lady who?” Now, they may not have realized something potentially funny about what they said which makes the punch line genuinely unexpected: “Wow, I didn’t know you could yodel!” This gives them the satisfying answer they have been waiting for the entire joke. If he had said “Little old lady drinks water,” this is much more expected and factual which fails to stimulate the mind. The initial idea of the old lady was completely transformed into a yodeling line with the addition of one word and I think this unexpected transformation is what makes something funny.

The essence of comedy to me is similar to beauty. An old saying which says ” beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” goes hand in hand with comedy. When something is funny to a person it is because what ever happened, what said, or seen appealed to the beholder. Different people have different preferences as to what makes them laugh. What you or I think is funny may not be what others find funny. Pain and accidents seem to be a main source of the world’s laughter. Very few people are able to see a person trip and fall or hit their head and not smile or laugh. The reason why this is true is still unclear but we all do it. Also, when a person is embarrassed we laugh due to their embarrassment. There is really no clear reason why something is funny or considered comical because so many people have so many different opinions about what is funny and what is not.  The question of what makes something funny is not really a question with an explanation. Comedy is in the eyes of the beholder.

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.

At first glance, comedy may seem like a sort of impulsive component of interaction that we process subconsciously. However, when the concept of comedy is thoroughly observed, many underlying factors come into play. Regardless of these components, most can agree that comedy, in general, evokes laughter. One interpretation that I made concerning humor is that we find situations or events funny when we are made to seem intellectual. If an individual gets hit in the face with a cream pie or falls down a flight of stairs, they seem sort of, well, stupid. Perhaps we find enjoyment in the fact that we are smarter than these seemingly unintelligible individuals, and this satisfaction translates to what we call comedy.

Yet, there certainly are some pieces of so-called “intellectual humor” that certain people find hilarious, regardless of whether or not a person is made to seem senseless. So, maybe my single definition of comedy needs a bit of revising. It is important to note that though intellectual humor does not label a person as dumb, it may cause viewers to seem more intelligent than the rest (in a sense, being less stupid than a person is the same as being more intelligent than that same person).

As I write this, I’m noticing that comedy encourages a sort of cutthroat atmosphere. It is evident that comedy can be very subjective (what some people find funny, others may find repulsive), but I’ve never really considered how egotistical it can be as well. Though my definitions seem to define a mere fraction of what makes something funny, there is clearly much more to be discovered in the world of humor.

My initial reaction to the question “what does comedy mean to you?” was to think about a comedy movie. Comedy movies, i believe, have skewed my perception of what “comedy” is. To me, it symbolizes something that will make me laugh out loud. This idea has been disproved simply by reading a short article about Joseph Haydn. In music, Comedy is found in the structure of a song, and doesn’t necessarily make us laugh. However, it enhances the entertainment that the song provides us with.

After thinking about it, I find it extremely hard to pair the word “comedy” with one single definition. The reason i say this is because there are many different uses of comedy and situations in which we see it. For example, a joke (comedy) can be used to make someone laugh intentionally, but can also be used to ease the tension or awkwardness of a situation. That is just a simple example of the different uses of comedy. Hopefully studying Haydn and comedy in music will help me find a better definition of what comedy really is.

When I was in high school, I took a class called Humor in Literature.  Our final project for the class was to simply answer this very same question: What is humor?  Many of my friends in the class went around surveying teachers and students to see what they thought.  The most popular answer was “Something that makes me laugh”.  But this answer is the obvious one.  It is the general idea of what humor or comedy is, but the question then becomes:  Then what exactly makes you laugh?

In my response to this question, I could probably say simply everything.  I always try to find the humor and comedy in life, no matter the situation.  This means I find many situations to be funny that others would not.  Some of these instances include in the middle of a field hockey game, during a really boring class lecture, or even when I am at church with my family.  Now I know that it is not very appropriate to be laughing at these times, but I cannot help it, I can find them comedic pretty much everywhere.  I was always taught that laughter is the best medicine.

I do find many practical things to be funny as well.  I love sarcasm more than pretty much anything in the world and use it constantly.  Aside from my own witty jokes, I love many other kinds of jokes including “That’s what she said” (office freak).  And like many others, I enjoy watching YouTube videos of people falling.  The latest thing I found comedic was my best friend telling me stories of what her brother did while he was on vicodin after his surgery this morning.  So, I guess I would say humor is something that makes me laugh, and for me that can be anything.  I think that if you live life humorously, then you will always find the good in any situation.  And a good life filled with many laughs is one worth living.

Oh, and this is really comedic too:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqEeP1acj4Y

Comedy, to me, is the good-humored joking around that will make someone laugh out loud. I do not find many tv shows or stupid humor movies funny such as : Step Brothers, How I Met Your Mother, or Tosh.O. I think that this type of humor attracts a specific type of humor that I just don’t find fascinating. I don’t know why but I have never been able to get into those types of shows and movies. Another type of humor that I don’t get are the videos on youtube. For instance, apparently everyone finds the cat videos hilarious, for some reason I don’t understand that type of humor either. My favorite type of humor is the type between friends. When someone does something stupid or embarrassing then we all laugh and then we make inside jokes about it. It is hard for me to go to a movie or watch a tv show and find something extremely hilarious to the point where I am crying from laughter. That being said, I find a lot of things in real life that are extremely funny where I do find myself crying. These types of things are the ones that happen randomly and not something that has been rehearsed or whatnot. There are some shows that I find funny, such as Drew Carry’s Improv-a-ganza and some stand-up. The best jokes come randomly and not planned, and that is what makes them funny, to me.

I have chosen to research the fascinating Pirahã Tribe, a group of roughly 420 hunter-gatherers that resides on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. What I found remarkable was the fact that this tribe does not know the concept of numbers or even written language. They speak in a series of whistles, hums, and very few, succinct phrases as a means of communication, especially while hunting in the Amazonian jungles. Because of their drastic limitations of language, they do not have a past tense built into any forms of communication. The tribe lives in the now, with their attention only being focused on the present and not the past nor the future. With no possibility of discussing the past, the tribe essentially believes that the past ceases to exist. This culture is clearly something remarkable, sparking an interest for me to delve deeper into the rarity of this primitive civilization.

1. “African Philosophy.” – New World Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2012. <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/African_philosophy>.

This source conveys the African philosophy of different cultures perceptions of time in relation to their religion. It talks about the existence of only the past and the present, and it states that the future does not exist because those events have not taken place yet. It mentions that there is no future salvation, but instead an afterlife.

1. Ellenskii. “Perception of Time in Different Cultures.” Scribd. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2012. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/24699041/Perception-of-Time-in-Different-Cultures>.

This is an essay that focuses on time perception in different cultures. It touches on the small country of Burundi in Central Africa and their lack of clocks. They choose not to base appointments and their perception of time off of a clock, but rather the natural cycles of life. It is completely acceptable for someone to be an hour ahead or behind the specified time.

1. “African Time.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 24 Sept. 2012. Web. 02 Oct. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_time>.

Time in Africa is much more relaxed than in busy, more western areas such a New York City. Africa is said to have an “emotional time consciousness”  which contrasts with Western “mechanical time consciousness”. African cultures follow a “polychronic” way of living, which means people tend to manage more than one thing at a time rather than in a strict sequence.

1. “Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals.” Sweet Chariot: The Story of the Spirituals. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2012. <http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/literature/time.cfm>.

This site focuses on the idea that African time does not more forward as many cultures do, but instead, it moves backwards. Time is not linear and it only consists of actual events that have already taken place, not events that will later take place. The future does not exist.

1. “Achievement and Time Perception – a South African Perspective.” Taylor and Francis. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Oct. 2012. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02580144.1994.10426530>.

This site recognizes the fact that Africans view time in a much more relaxed fashion than those of the western cultures. It also recognizes that Africans produce a low productivity rate and struggle to produce revenue. This website consists of a poll that was taken that produced the conclusion that Africans need to change their perception on time in order to make greater achievements. They need to maximize and utilize their time better in order if they want to do better for themselves.

1. “Rhythm in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 09 May 2012. Web. 02 Oct. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa>.

This site pertains to musical time in Sub- Saharan Africa in reference with African drumming. It talks about rhythm suggesting stages of life and emotions that people go through. “cross beats” represent challenges in life.