By Mary Ann Cook
I recently interviewed, for the third time, someone who makes a living analyzing humor, and I'm trying to figure out why these people generally just aren't very funny. These are the folks who show us how we can gain a healthier perspective, live a more graceful life and have more fun using the tonic of humor. They sort out and explain the ramifications of humor for the rest of us so that we, too, can use humor to help sell ourselves, our ideas and/or products.
These experts are not necessarily comics themselves, but they've studied the process of creating humor, have dissected and held it up to the fun-house mirror. Finely tuned in the pursuit of humor, they've got their comic antennae out, their funny bones ready to be cracked.
I'm always eager to do these interviews, so there's a let-down factor at work. Maybe even if you were facing someone as professionally adroit as Jerry Seinfeld or David Letterman, you'd be disappointed. But, truth be told, the humor mongers I've met don't make me laugh, and I want to find out why.
The first interviewee was a college instructor. He was cut from the tweed-jacket-and-leather-elbows professorial cloth: He worked the community college and senior center circuit. He told some jokes, anecdotal stuff, somewhat amusing. Because he was natural and unassuming and gracious, he put you immediately into his camp. His audience was pre-sold: He has a regional reputation and he rode it. So he got more appreciative chuckles than others with the same material would have--even those with better timing and presentation skills.
His approach was academic, instructional. And the audience learned a lot. For example: humor produces endorphins that combat pain; it's been scientifically proven that humor helps keep you healthy. He went even further: He said that humor would one day be a prime measure for intelligence in IQ tests--good news for class clowns and grown-up versions of same. His talk held lots of interesting insights, was entertaining, somewhat amusing, but not downright funny.
The second humor purveyor directs his message to business people. He gives talks at conventions and business meetings of all kinds, and he offers classes in how to add humor to sales presentations, and even to spark up technical reports.
He offers a handout with dozens of ideas for bringing humor into your business and personal life. The word pathetic doesn't begin to describe these suggestions. Here's an example: Make a competition out of who fouled up most that week. That should dissipate some of the feelings of failure. Seems like it would just draw attention to something that had better be forgotten.
This speaker advocates being a turncoat. That is, he wants you to pretend you didn't really mean to be funny if your story doesn't generate laughter from your listeners. If it bombs, don't admit it's a joke, he advises. But failure is a prolific and fertile field of humor. Seems like he ought to be able to mine it to produce more laughs, not turn tail and hide. He not only wasn't funny; he wasn't effective or even true to himself.
The third humor vender was a woman. She had sharper edges than the other two, a brittle quality that made one wonder how she got into the game. Had she sensed that lack in herself and taken it as a challenge, as people who become psychiatrists so often do because they want to figure out their own psychoses?
She took herself and her work so seriously she didn't seem to be having any fun with it. How could she reap any harvest from humor if she refused to till the most fertile ground of all--her own foibles? She never hinted at a mistake made, a road not taken. Her passage was straight ahead, nary a side trip, nary a hint of peripheral vision.
How did someone so free of barnacles get enmeshed in a messy quagmire like humor? Whenever I tried to step into that muddy morass, she sought higher ground. She talked in generalities, said the world needed more humor. I had to admire how adroitly she could back-pedal to dry land.
Note: These people didn't tell stories about themselves. Even the professor talked about his child, not his own experiences, his own take on his world. Sure, humor is serious stuff, but its practitioners don't have to be.
Perhaps the very qualities that make up humor just can't be analyzed. Surprise, for one. How can you analyze surprise? If you analyze surprise, it becomes a known, a non-surprise. So, in committing vivisection, you kill the humor.
One speaker compared joke-telling to a train going downhill, and the punch line representing a derailment. Using this analogy, what you do when you investigate humor is to derail the derailment. One derailment is funny. Two, evidently, is not.
Tension is another example of taking the snap out of humor. Building tension is one of the basic building blocks of humor. And laughter is the release from this tension. But when you talk about tension, you effectively defuse it, so tension, too, is lost when examined too closely.
Close scrutiny tamps out all the sparks of humor. Humor, like happiness, must be a byproduct of the pursuit of something else. The simple act of chasing it renders it downright unattainable.
Los Gatan Mary Ann Cook is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, December 25, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved