CSotD: The appeal of intelligent silliness
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The only sad part of this Sheldon is that it's too late to be included in Dave Kellett's collection of literature-based cartoons, "Literature! Unsuccessfully Competing Against Television Since 1953," which is one of the funniest collections of cartoons I've ever read.
I will admit to a prejudice in favor of literate humor. It can be "literate" in the sense of literature, or in the sense of having some basic knowledge of history or philosophy or current affairs, but it needs, at the very least, to be based on real things, not on stereotypes and misconceptions.
And a bit of a wink to minor-but-not-obscure facts makes a joke just that much more fun.
For example, a joke about Genghis Khan being a bad, scary dude might be amusing, but a gag about an older Mongol going bald so that tattooed secret messages on his scalp from 30 years ago are now visible to his grandchildren would be poentially much funnier, because it relies on your knowing that, yes, that was one way the Khan sent messages.
Kellett employs an excellent layout here because, thanks to Broadway and cinema and a few high school literature classes, and the fact that he references the first chapter of the book, a lot of people will get the "Les Miserables" gag.
And, while there are any number of people who adore "Madame Bovary," there are any larger number who found it pretty hard slogging.
Then he finishes up with a real punchline, the Camus reference that is absolutely on the mark and will blow up even those of us who really liked the book and who, thanks to that novel, were suddenly, at 13 or 14, made aware of what literature can do.
It is less a laugh at the book than at our overly serious junior-high selves, proudly and self-consciously taking our first step into the deep end of the intellectual pool.
And that is a very laughable subject indeed.
There is a principle of great humor, which is, you have to know it before you can mock it. A wide body of knowledge is a good start.
The Pythons, for example, were all from Cambridge and Oxford. The National Lampoon was full of Ivy Leaguers, many veterans of the Harvard Lampoon, but, notably, at least one Dartmouth grad as well.
And the first writing team at Saturday Night Live was a wonderfully literate crew as well, though being literate and having actually finished a degree aren't necessarily the same thing.
Academic literacy is hardly the only mark of knowing it before you can mock it. Lucille Ball was revered by her peers for her devotion to researching gags and her insistence on appropriate props.
Bob Hope told of stopping at a red light and seeing Lucy in the window of a pizzeria, throwing crusts. He went in and she swore him to secrecy, since she had a working-in-a-pizzeria plotline coming up and was learning to do it right so that she could properly do it wrong.
Any two-bit actor can throw raw dough and flour around, but only a true clown can do it wrong right. Lucy was a clown, and, even if viewers didn't realize how much went into her act, that painstaking difference is why she is in the pantheon of great clowns.
There is a distinction between greatness and financial success, of course, and you can certainly be commercially successful without going to those sorts of lengths. Primetime TV (and the current SNL) are lessons in how well you can do with predictable, juvenile gags, in a world in which the ice cream name "Schweddy Balls" is considered wit.
And there's nothing new in that. In medieval days, the peasantry enjoyed all sorts of low ribaldry from the Punch-and-Judy shows and other entertainments of the public square.
It should be noted, however, that, back in those days, nobody with the slightest hint of common sense thought that anybody in that audience of gormless, giggling nitwits was qualified to take an active role in governing.
The trick to good, successful comedy is to get a laugh from the mob while also creating something with a hint of actual wit to it, and you don't have to be high-brow to accomplish that: There's something endearing about a routine that combines history and philosophy of science with birds escaping into the audience (sorry about the ad):
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