Next to “what is scary” I think the hardest question for a writer to answer is “what is funny?” Thankfully, the questions is slightly less difficult in that it is asking “What make me laugh?”
Of slapstick, boogers, and farts
I think it really depends on my mood. Of course, different things have made me laugh at different times in my life. For example, when I was in my late teens in early 20s, namely, my college years, I really had no place in my life for slapstick humor – the lights of which was making Jim Carrey a very wealthy man. but something happened a few years after I got out of college. I sat down and watched Dumb & Dumber, and I actually enjoyed it. I just took the movie at face value. It was dumb. Dumb humor, goofy stuff. It wasn’t trying to be highbrow humor by any stretch of the imagination and sometimes that’s perfectly OK.
Highbrow humor for the mind
On the other hand, sometimes I like highbrow humor. I like humor that makes you think a little; humor that you have to have a little bit of background knowledge in order to understand. The show Fraser comes to mine when I think of eyebrow humor. No, it’s true, that you did not have to be an intellectual to understand all the humor on that show, but every now and then, there were moments where it definitely helped.
Camp, or theater of the absurd
Camp is kind of a weird style of humor. If you could make it work, it’s brilliant. But a lot of people can’t pull it off. I think of the 1966 Batman TV series that’s probably the greatest example of camp. Starr, Adam West referred to it as “theater of absurd“.
The great thing about Batman was that kids could get one thing from it and that they saw a superhero and dire peril and thought “this is serious!“ Where is your older brother or their dad may have left hysterically at the fact that Batman and Robin were being tied to barbecue grills while sitting on giant magnifying glasses. Joel Schumacher attempted, and failed spectacularly, to inject a bit of camp style humor into Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. Plus, it didn’t help that audiences weren’t ready to go back to a campy Batman quite yet.
This is, by no means an all-encompassing list of everything that makes me laugh; but I think you get the idea.
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- Still Feeling Socrates
- Rob’s World Tour – international edition
- Compassion and youthfulness
- Rob in Retirement
The article “what makes Rob laugh” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob
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