Humor2021

     The second half of the book,  Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s  by Tiffany Midge takes on the more serious issues of politics, specifically in Donald Trump in a less humorous sense. In one chapter she recounts the KKK riots in Charlottesville, Virginia saying, “President Trump minimalized the destructive rally by stating to the press that the white nationalists included ‘some very fine people.’ And place blame on both the perps and the victims: ‘We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” (171). Midge establishes a more historical and formal recount of politics in the second half of the book, where less humor is given, but she still of course has her sly one liners such as, “He is clearly cuckoo for Cocoa puffs” (171). I was born and raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I was at my home when these horrific riots occurred and white supremacists raided our city, and it tainted the rep...

  I didn't realize how close to home Midge's first chapter "Bury my Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's" would hit. I have been dating my boyfriend Jake for almost five years now. We met at the age of seventeen and have been together ever since. While Jake is great, and my best friend, blah blah, what makes dating Jake a hundred times better is his family. Immediately, Jake's dad, mom, and two younger brothers became a very important and special part of my life. Weekends were always spent at Jake's house around the dinner table as Jake's dad would prepare us a gourmet home-cooked Sunday dinner meal. Being surrounded by a family of boys is nothing less of entertaining. However, the relationship I formed with Jake's mom is one of my most special memories. Johnna was nothing short of incredible–smart, witty, creative, and extremely fashionable. I always looked forward to accompanying her on errands, rummaging through her massive closet with her digging up fami...

 While it's often said that laughter is the best medicine, as per its association with joy, Descartes disagrees and adds is own, purely rationalist analysis of laughter. The Cartesian reasons for laughter are, at their core, physical. He categorically defines the reason for laughter as the biological response to a trigger. Whether it be wonder or drunkenness, Descartes' methods are pragmatic and uncreative. An arbiter of authority himself, his philosophy tries to account for mechanical, rational catalyst to humanity's most effective supposed cure-all. It worked wonders for Jayden and I. Jayden is in the ninth grade, would love to play high school football, and, coincidentally has a hand drawn Kermit the Frog screensaver for Zoom. It was funny, so naturally I laughed. Perhaps it was out of the Cartesian wonder or amazement as it was certainly not a result of any form of  intoxication, my laughter was infectious and immediately spread to Jayden. We worked on a summary piece f...

 Laughter as a Release Valve Two well-known philosophers, Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud understand laughter and humor as a reliever of tension. They arrive at the conclusion that humor (in opposition to wit and comic) is able to release potentially harmful tension, traumas, or stressors that could otherwise cause harm. These are the first humor theorists that have rooted their work in the outcomes of humor as a personal tool. Others examine humor only as it relates to incongruity, superiority, and vice. These fail to capture the healing properties of humor.       My favorite image of Spencer’s is the student giving a speech in class who is fidgeting because of nervous tension/excitement (110). He leads his reader to believe that laughter can be a release valve for this type of nervous excitement.      Freud captures the liberation that humor can provide in his explanation of the ego and super ego’s relation to trauma and laughter as a way to...

  In Response to René Descartes In reading the excerpts on laughter and its relation to emotion as Descartes exhorts, I was continually reminded of Thomas Hobbes's philosophy. The similarities persist throughout the digressions on laughter and humor while diverging in aspects that distinguish the two men fundamentally. What is immediately apparent is the two men's proclamations of pseudoscience to understand the origin of laughter in the body. Both Hobbes and Descartes are early enlightenment thinkers and thus are at the precipice of beginning to converge philosophy and science practices. For the sake of giving credit where credit is due, both men are at the cutting edge of their time and attempting to discern the correlations of emotion and physiology in a way that has been absent to a point in the colloquial lexicon of theory.  Furthermore, what caused me to pause and wonder was Descartes' digressions on jest. While reading through the excerpts from "Article 178, 179...

As opposed to the philosophical views of the likes of Plato, Descartes offers a much more literal sense of the principal causes of laughter and the parts of the body involved in the process. He writes, “Laughter consists in the fact that the blood, which proceeds from the right orifice in the heart by the arterial vein, inflating the lungs suddenly and repeatedly, causes the air which they contain to be constrained to pass out from them with an impetus by the wind-pipe, where it forms an inarticulate and explosive utterance” (Descartes 21-22). Immediately after this fresh take on the parts of the body involved in laughter, Descartes lists what he believes are the principal causes and, more importantly, why it doesn’t involve the principal joys. He offers the idea that although laughter may look like it is related to joy, it cannot be caused by joy, with the exception of when it has some wonder or hate mixed in with it. This idea of hate being mixed in with laughter goes back to the ide...

    Philosopher Herbert Spencer offers another explanation for humor called the "Relief Theory." He believes that laughter is the release of nervous energy through muscular movement--providing a "comic relief" of sorts. Like Kant, he believes that this physiological release produces positive feelings. However, like Descartes, Spencer mentions that laughter can come from sources other than joy--like hatred or self-elevation. T his intellectual exploration of these philosophers, Sedaris, and myself left me with a complex definition of comic relief. Are we merely expending nervous energy, or relieving ourselves of our internal pain?  Spencer critiques the incongruity theory because it states that only feelings of self-elevation produces laughter. He states, "But this theory, whatever portion of the truth it may contain, is, in the first place, open to fatal objection that there are various humiliations to other which produce in us anything but laughter; and, in th...

Descartes, Spenser, and Freud offer a very technical view of humor, where the bodily reaction of laughter is indicative of the reason for our amusement. Common to each author, there was a fascination with the physical act of laughing, where laughter exists as a function and signal for objective humor. Descartes writes, "But although it seems as though laughter were one of the principal signs of joy, nevertheless joy cannot cause it except when it is moderate and has some wonder or hate mingled with it." (Descartes 22) I singled this quote out because I believe it can be connected to our previous authors; laughter, as Sedaris demonstrates, is not always funny. As Plato and Hobbes indicate, humor can be potentially immoral regarding the subject of the joke. Descartes, Spenser, and Freud advance this point to suggest that a laughing reaction might mean something other than immorality, such as wonder, injustice, or hatred. I think Sedaris would agree with the point in light of hi...

The theories of humor and laughter by Spencer and Freud reminded me and explained in greater detail the idea we discussed in class which is that humor does not always equate to laughter and laughter does not always equate to humor. Spencer talks about how human emotion can utter a physical response. He discusses how when one experiences a certain weight of emotion, their body has a physical response to the felt emotion. Specifically, in terms of laughter he says that one produces laughter when extreme or nervous excitement is felt, “In a modified form this principle holds with voluntary acts. Nervous excitation always tends to beget muscular motion; and when it rises to a certain intensity always does beget it” (Freud 100). While, nothing in a given situation may be humorous, it can still produce laughter. To draw from an example from my own life, I drove with my friend on Saturday to Southern Virginia to pick up his new puppy. When we walked in, I held him and immediately started laug...

  Descartes and Freud’s humor theories of humor, although complex, both address sense of humor and why it  differentiates  amongst individuals.    As discussed in class, not everyone will find the same thing funny or at least not in the same way. Furthermore, sometimes humor may exist without laughter and vice versa. In the cases of  Irby and Sedaris, it appeared that the whole class was able to decipher moments or stories in the text that  were  humorous.  Nevertheless, there are points of contention ,  which became clear in  students’  different analyses  of the same story. I t’s possible that laughter occurs for different reasons even  in reading the same stories.    It seems that the concept of humor cannot be separated from perception and context.  As readers or “hearers” to use the Freudian term, of humor,  individuals bring each of their own psychologies and past experiences to the humorist ...

    Sigmund Freud’s analysis of humor builds on and attempts to reconcile many previous theories that we’ve read so far in class. Three major theories that he uses are the theories of incongruity, relief, and superiority.      He begins with the Incongruity theory, agreeing that the deception of expectations leads to the feeling of humor. But then Freud asks why? Why should humor be derived from incongruity? What happens in the brain to cause that? He uses the example of a hangman who is unconcerned with his death. While that maintains “the denial of the claim of reality” (113), it is still not entertaining. This leads him into the relief theory.      Freud corrects the failing of incongruity by stating that there needs to be a “triumph of the pleasure principle,” a “repudiation of the possibility of suffering” (113): in other words, Kierkegaard’s concept of relief. But Freud points out how that same concept is the core in many different psychoses...

Reading David Sedaris made me secretly long for Sam Irby. Not that one is better or worse than the other, but the comparison of these two modern works of humor have shown me that humor can be done differently. Irby's was shatter-the-glass-ceiling-ironic-relatable funny, while Sedaris takes a more dry, hyperbolic, and grounded funny. To be frank, I did not laugh while reading this; however, I don't think laughter is the only indication of a humorous piece. Sedaris flaunts a humor that is more of an "aha" moment; it is harder to read, but forced you to wonder why. For example, I did not find 'The Incomplete Quad' or 'You Can't Kill the Rooster' funny. Rather, I was shocked and slightly repulsed. The disrespect towards the disabled Peg and incessant swearing by the Rooster felt wholly unnecessary and uncomfortable. Could these reactive feelings indicate something deeper, though? Maybe Sedaris wanted to express the harsh reality of living as a disabled...

  There is something about David Sedaris’ humor in his collection of short stories,  The Best of Me  that feels more grounded than hilariously laughable. I find his writing mildly amusing but not outrageously comical. If a reader wanted to read something that could match Irby’s hilarity, David Sedaris would not be the writer they are looking for. In a similar manner to Irby, he uses life stories to inform his humor. However, Irby and Sedaris take different routes in the way that they explain their lives. Sedaris, a white man, writes—arguably—blander stories that are focused on how they shape his life. In his introduction, he uses an Allan Gurganus quote that reads, “Without much accuracy, and strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they’ll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you’ve changed into that very simple shape” (Sedaris, 6). His stories follow this sentiment of familial molding which is surprisingly humorous. His h...

  When I began reading David Sedaris’ collection of essays in The Best of Me, I was turned off by the apparent smugness that came through the narrator. Even though it is apparent through his over-the-top hyperbolic style and tone, I left feeling unamused and a bit disgusted. Plainly, I felt as though the themes and motifs that Sedaris incorporates into these short anecdotes were muddled by the writer’s constant proclivity towards the antithetical virtues of a naive narrator. That being said, there is one particular essay that I did admire for its succinct message. In “The Incomplete Quad”, I was struck by the selfishness of the narrator and his inability to understand the nature of kindness. Sedaris weaves his narrative through his time at Kent State University where he took care of a paraplegic named Peg with Muscular Dystrophy. Throughout the short essay, Sedaris recalls the delinquent activities Peg and him engaged in from shoplifting to hitchhiking home to North Carolina from...

  From the moment one opens up David Sedaris’ The Best of Me , it is clear that the author’s sense of humor is not the same in comparison to that of Irby’s in Wow, No Thank You . After all, a book titled The Best of Me probably wouldn’t delve too far into self-deprecating humor. Even with this, Sedaris still manages to find the same level of relatability that Irby did in her writing. Sedaris’ writing and humor focuses much more on sarcasm to convey humor, while also presenting it in a much more natural way. A great example of this can be found in the introduction, where Sedaris tells the reader about the angry mail he received regarding an entry in his book about bears. He writes, “Of all the entries in this book, the one that generated the most anger was ‘The Motherless Bear.’ Oh, the mail I got. ‘How dare you torture animals like this!’ ‘It’s a fictional story,’ I wrote back to everyone who complained. ‘The giveaway is that the title character speaks English and feels sorry for ...

     The short story which stood out to me the most upon reading the first half   Best of Me   by David Sedaris was the story, “The Incomplete Quad.” When I first read this story, I was a bit taken aback to hear the story, descriptions, and word choice surrounding the character Peg, who had “a degenerative nerve disease” (Sedaris 35). At first I thought the humor used in this piece was slightly unrefined and offensive, after I reread the chapter I realized how Sedaris was using the character Peg and humor to break down the norms regarding handicapped people and society. Sedaris uses this simple and crude humor to show how wrongly Peg is treated. For example, he writes, “Outside the dorm, the only people to address us would speak as if we were deaf, kneeling beside the chair to shout, ‘FATHER TONY IS HAVING A GUITAR MASS THIS SUNDAY. WOULD YOU LIKE TO JOIN US?’ (Sedaris 36). And Peg replies, “I collect teeth from live kittens and use them to make necklaces for Sa...

  David Sedaris takes a deliberate approach in the first half of The Best of Me. In placing “Glen’s  Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3 No. 2 ” as the first story after the Introduction, Sedaris brings the reader into  his  world  of stories   that he  foreshadowed   in the Introduction.  In the Introduction he writes, “The pieces in this book – both fiction and nonfiction – are the sort I hoped to produce back  when I first started writing, at the age of  twenty”  ( 6). Furthermore, he also points out that it’s impossible for everyone t o like his work, so that forces the reader into a state of accountability if they themselves do not like his work or approach. So, the style and humor of the first story sets the tone for what fol lows.    The chapters increasingly become  more cruel . For  example,  in “The Incomplete Quad” Sedaris describes  living with students with disabilities because Kent State wou...