Sometimes humour is the taste of the day but a narrow band that is dark, ironic, superior, not too broad nor cerebral. Kept inside the tidy vinyl-extruded fences. What’s it doing there? It polices and reinforces boundaries and norms, is an act of control thru distance, vents frustration, anger or sadness. Is all humour that?
Humour isn’t an emotional state. Is it even a choice? It may come from a worldview of what is appropriate, but it is an outward behavior, a strategy to an end. Or is it pure response, the only reasonable response to laugh or make laughs?
Humour seems to be one of those life skill things. And poetry skill things. But too light of look and people can get nervous that its not real poetry. (Or at least nervous people do.) What’s that about? One generally takes the world seriously when one takes self seriously and taking self seriously comes from threat, fear, protectionism, ambition.
What’s the opposite end of the dynamic? Ampleness, belief in one’s own capacity to rebound, exploration, curiosity. If one feels threatened, can one reverse engineer to security that thru adopting behavior?
Poetry wants to hold course, not cop out too early or cop out by hanging onto the bandstand long after the last straggler of the band has gone home. Where’s the sweet spot?
Nah, think I’ve chased myself into a wet paper sack again. Definitions seem all wrong.
The whole humour grid depends on what range you’re used to. One person’s quip is another’s caustic. Some cheeky is too subtle to catch, a non-event, for a mismatched audience. Some outrageous is quaint, depending on what counts as normal. To vary too much too fast is like someone turning the lights on and off while someone else is watching stars out the window, or to alternately yell and whisper. It becomes more irritating because it is making it hard to match pace with. Humour needs a certain curve and time space for the eye and ear to keep up and perceive.
Humour works by contrasts to expectations, pulling aspects into isolation or exaggerations. The set up may be in the telling, or built into the audience and the observation providing the contrast, pushing taboos or absurdity.
Wait, I think I can make this dryer and pound the life out of the subject yet.
Let me go over here: At Neatorama on Steve Martin, As he studied philosophy and logic, he came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as logic, which led to the non-sequitur comedy routine he became known for later on.
“In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it.
What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song. These notions formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines? What if I created tension and never released it? What would the audience do with all that tension?
Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. The audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.”
There’s no narrative arc and twist of an ending. It’s more like the pure play, like otters or chimps sliding down an embankment, or kids making up new rules for imaginary games as they go — not quite sure where they are going or where it will stop. It’s more the ride than the trajectory.
The non-sequitur links naturally to surrealism. Ottawa-born artist Gregg Simpson was part of the West Coast Surrealist Group in the 70s with David uu and others. They took up the 1930s torch of Dadaism again. Is the surrealist aim revolution and rebellious contemptuous shattering of all that is wrong? Surrealism Now, says it has moved on, not tied to old histories. It arrives from a “drive to engage the marvelous, the wonders of the mind, its relation to the universe”, to re-open eyes. It seems a turn, like clapper to redirect to see beauty and possibility not pathos and pathetic of old.
What does that rely on as its reply foil? Surreal or satire wouldn’t work if someone didn’t take it seriously and/or find it offensive. Some satire is indistinguishable from the absurdity of actual events, thus The Onion getting taken as real news every now and again.
Non-sequitur wouldn’t work if we didn’t automatically prime these scenarios of what should properly come next. It makes a complex position if we take in too much of non-sequitur because then it has nothing to work against. For irony to work, or moral outrage, or innocence or whatever, there has to be a contrast. Too much comedy in ratio to dreadful events or boring repetition and there’s no contrast. You get diminishing returns.
While I suppose surrealism could be motivated by just wanting to be difficult, or knock from thought habits, it could become a one-trick pony too. Thus Steve Martin moving back out of comedy to music where the arrangement and relationship of expected and variation is also the dynamic played with.
In music, comedy, visual surrealism and non-linear poetry you’re trying to set up some mild pleasurable startle. A disconnect from exact repetition into a different direction.
How can humour pair with poetry? To vary the mix, the distance, the tone, to keep it interesting. For the brain not to go into test pattern, the pattern needs to be mixed up. To taste the palate refreshed.
I could do a page of comparison and it might accumulate to something funny. Otherwise it would be a wash, like poems that repeat too much to be fresh but not enough to become absurd, nor long enough to have a different sort of weight of simple things accumulating like a well-done pantoum, or nathalie stephens’ somewhere running. One thing becomes another effect when there is enough of it to become large enough to become a point of reference within itself. A novel that creates it own universe. A running gag can run to absurd lengths. When has it run far enough? How long does it have to sit before the audience recuperates and requests another run? What is the optimal stretch of sensible, sombre, sad, sassy and so on before we can get back to silly or surreal?
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One must be permeable, flexible. It seems to be one of my cardinal rules that informs what I write. Why am I after this target of making more variation, more self-aware comedy, in an already varied range?
Why do I insist on what people tell me is so much variation?
Rewind to childhood for clues? Getting the same stories told the same way at me while others had no patience and rebuffed any repetition, both a defensive mechanisms by those around me. I didn’t want to be shut down nor boring so mix it up mandate. It’s a theory.
Or it’s a product of my attention span, inherent, incidental or trained, that needs to continually refresh my palate in order to taste anything. That’s encouraged bodily by my spine that complains should I maintain one position too long. I feel impelled to keep shifting in one sense or another. The lesson could have summed to persist past obstacles just as easily. The dime just didn’t happen to fall head side up?
At the same time I leap at a headspinning pace. Parcelling out ideas and training myself to following one thru many facets helps me track linearly more. I enjoy how my brain is cross-wired to bounce from any node to another like a jack rabbit but it can be tiring than amusing for some to follow me. It lends itself to humour tho.
People adapt to a certain speed and angle, want the same vein to be consistent: clever, or gentle, profound or amusing. To always be shifting away is a habit as much as droning on. If one responds the same way no matter the stimulus that doesn’t seem optimal. There’s no actual response, only a responding. Laugh no matter what, find the down side in anything, or how it demonstrates the constant bottom line whether that is: god is good or nothing matters or whatever This Only Goes to Show…
Perhaps an antidote to myself is to stretch and sustain some rut of subtle variations. But then, I do inside haiku and senryu. Still in there I push to language play. Don’t just do something, sit there. Repeat. Continue. Bore yourself but not silly? Hm. Not satisfied with that upshot either.
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