March 22nd, 2013
Not that Funny
I’ve never really been able to describe my sense of humor. I don’t feel like I’m very good at telling jokes, at least not off the cuff. I have to be able to write stuff down and give it some thought. On the flip side of that, I can usually make people laugh with reactionary type stuff. Like, playing off of other people and taking things further than they were taking it. Sort of. Anyway, where did that arrow-through-the-head gag come from? Steve Martin, I think? I saw an old stand-up of his on YouTube once, but I didn’t really get it. He didn’t really tell any jokes, he just kinda played with props. Silly hats and stuff. It was really weird.
It’s amazing how some humor will age better than others. I think a lot of Steve Martin’s standup, which was hilarious in its day doesn’t hold up. The same can be said for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in, which was hugely successful when I was a kid but now just falls flat. Much of the old Monty Python TV show still works, and I can still laugh at it. There are few things as subjective as humor.
Right. Comedy is reaching people and ideas in new and interesting ways by breaking expectations. Rely too much on context, and the humor dies with the context. Rely too much on delivery, and it wears over time. I’d say Ence’s strength in comedy is two-fold; his timing and his delivery. Someone will give him an idea for a joke and he’ll light the freaking thing on FIRE. Many of the slice of life jokes he writes for the comic come from our everyday lives.
If I were to say Ence has a single super-power it’s this; he can make any statement or situation seem insidious. A harmless convenience store clerk becomes a prophet of death, a dog barking in the night is a warning of horror to come. He’s quite proficient.
and everyone knows profic are the best ficin the cy