I try to write public entries on occasion, but anything from before college, and most of the good stuff (if there is any at all) is only visible to account holders whom I've approved as friends. Feel free to join the site and add me, if you like...I could use more LJ friends. Macroblogging is a dying lifestyle!

I've noticed that, even when I find something on TV or in a movie funny, I probably won't laugh at it as I would laugh at much less in everyday conversation. I sometimes laugh involuntarily if something is absurd enough to kind of tickle me, but most of the time I choose to laugh in appreciation of something witty. And I'm wondering what I find witty. I find most of today's humor pretty unoriginal, lazy, and boring. I enjoy those sort of minimalist comedies like The Office, but the humor there lies much more in execution and performance than in an inherently good script. I suppose that, in general, what I appreciate most are the clever connections people find between things. This is how I've come to view wit, and I'm amazed to find that one dictionary definition is "the ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things." Very specific, but I agree completely.

Although I don't have great social skills, I can be decent at making jokes in conversation, particularly in calling back things we were talking about before whenever they can humorously apply to a current topic or statement. I wasn't always so good at being funny, despite always having had the ability to connect disparate things like this. The key is to do it humorously, not pedantically. But what is it that makes a connection humorous?

Absurdity is a huge piece of humor. The purely random and silly, or the fusion of serious and completely unserious. Just for example, here's a joke I laughed at today, from Paula Poundstone: "Iranian speedboats zooming up to U.S. Navy warships. Some fear defiant water skiers may follow." This is funny because it connects speedboats following warships to water skiers following speedboats, and places the serious next to the silly. In this conjunction, the joke imparts the thought that speedboats are kind of absurd, in that they can be used for both military and recreational activities.

Such humor can go much deeper though, and then it's satire. The Onion is an incredible example of such humor, connecting the serious headlines we always see to the trivial, everyday things and showing us how all this information we constantly take in, serious and trivial, may be getting jumbled in our minds. An article that makes me laugh out loud every time is More Americans Getting Their News from Bev. This piece brilliantly compares the serious news media to those middle-aged women in curlers who come up to you and ask, "Have you been following all this news that's been going on?" Well-done satire seems like fluffy comedy as you enjoy it, but really carries a lot of food for thought. What is the relationship between these two seemingly unrelated things? Is one of them in fact absurd, as the joke implies? If we weren't laughing along, we'd probably find the connection too uninteresting to investigate.

A form of wit less dependent upon absurdity infuses connections not with such contrast, but with things we perceive as really hitting the nail of humanity on the head. Impure motivations that always appear in traditional story jokes, like greed, laziness, sex, and just insults in general. This still usually contains a degree of absurdity, but it's often within the realm of credulity. A typical blonde joke, for instance, takes the connection between two things (say, the shape of donuts and Cheerios) and uses it to illustrate stupidity. A slightly more absurd your-mom-is-so-fat joke also tends to make connections between things of different size.

Sometimes I'll make a connection by itself and consider posting a Facebook status to share it. But even if it's clever, it's probably not funny when I first think of it. I have to mold that connection into a joke by adding a human element, some motivation or character trait that people can recognize. A recent stupid example might be, "Breaking news: Occupy Wall Street actually just a really dedicated line of Black Friday shoppers." The connection is the people camping outside, which a lot of people probably ended up making. But unlike a statement such as, "There are now people camped outside for Black Friday and for Occupy," mine runs on our dark side, our desperateness to get bargains. It's this jab at human nature that makes us smile.


Of course, most of us think of wit as occurring more immediately than a Twitter post or satirical article. I think this is only because immediacy is the true test of wit, for two reasons: 1) we have very little time to form a funny sentence, and 2) we have very tight constraints upon our material. Many comedians will insult someone off the cuff, appearing to be witty when they've been sitting on that generic zinger for weeks. And that's okay, because if we want to be entertained in a dense format, people should be storing up their resources. Still, I hesitate to describe a show as witty. I first planned this entry's topic because everyone calls Frasier one of the wittiest shows ever on television. The characters are very, very witty; I'll give them that. But can a show be witty when the writers have not just time to think of a joke but also freedom to set a joke up? Frasier has some of the most predictable and contrived retorts I've ever seen. A component fixed in its surroundings can be witty, because someone has had to originate it within external confines. But for a script to be witty, given all the innumerable options its writers have had, it must be so chock full of wit that one would have to be witty simply to have squeezed any more in beyond the saturation point a non-witty person could achieve. Overall, I don't consider Frasier to be a witty show. On the other hand, Seinfeld or Curb, with plotlines that can intersect a dozen times in an episode, has to be witty; no simple-minded individual could fit that many jokes into a coherent narrative. And Arrested Development is an absolute work of genius. A show like Three's Company, with complex misunderstandings, could be witty if it were dense enough, but that show never was. Maybe a few "misunderstandings" episodes of Frasier did achieve that.


The above ramblings describe what I find funny. I laugh when I appreciate a joke for being witty, as defined by making connections in a humorous way. I don't tend to laugh at physical comedy, puns, shock humor, lazy awkwardness, or stand-ups throwing out absolute statements with loads of attitude. But I think that the first two can be witty sometimes: physical comedy can connect actions and objects using visual gags; meanwhile puns, the lowest and least universal form of humor, connect using language. Shock and awkwardness are like the humor part without the connection, and they feel empty to me. Sassy stand-ups can make clever connections, or could just be talking about human nature, but often their jokes are even more empty, 100% delivery. I kind of wish I could appreciate a broader spectrum of humor, but it seems to me that people who like the simpler stuff don't get the more complex stuff. Which could, perhaps, be good for their independent thought. You have to watch out for who's wielding the powerful tool of humor. Satire is the highest form, and can seriously change your mind when you get the joke. Of course, even dumb sitcoms and stand-ups can teach you what behaviors to laugh at, especially when the laughtrack or audience goads you. Sometimes I feel like media ecologists only use TV for complete junk because it's a medium too stupid for important things. But comedy is an underestimated form of rhetoric; everything leaves you with a message, and changes your mind just a little bit.

I recently wrapped up my entries on math by talking a little bit about science and questioning the extent to which science relates to reality. My objection was that the things we consider real objects aren't truly objects without our perspective, in which we name and classify them.

The other day I was sitting in Mechanics and thinking about how we use science to describe reality. I contrasted it with mythology, which we grow up learning is how people used to explain what they found in nature. We respect its literary qualities, but sort of ridicule it from our modern, rational perspective. We wonder how could anyone believe such ridiculous things. And today we still have religious explanations of reality versus the scientists who dismiss it as outdated and either unprovable or disprovable. But even forgetting that we can't rigorously prove anything by science, I have some problems seeing science as completely different.

In order to make science feasible, we must divide reality (which is singular across space and time) into parts, and attack them individually. As I stated in the previous entry on this topic, there are endless ways to do this, and we choose one of the few that make science productive. So we subdivide reality, come up with names like "electron" and, based on this division, determine the external properties implied by identity and the internal properties that determine identity. This strikes me as being an awful lot like mythology: picking one thing that stands out as having an essence; naming it; determining its behavior; and trying to determine its composition, or motivation for this behavior. Science does this much more effectively and neutrally than does mythology: controlled experiments and the openness to new ideas allow us to focus on getting the truth, and we've consciously rejected personification. But everything we understand at a macroscopic level, we understand in oversimplified terms, terms chosen to make sense to us even if they don't include personalities.

At each level we choose to study, we can correctly identify all behaviors of our particles. Ultimately, though, these behaviors are wholly determined by the composition of the particles, and don't truly exist outside our decision to use them as an explanation. A really egregious example is something like fluid mechanics, which we understand through the lens of particular continuous laws that work for us, even though the phenomena we look at there are most accurately described by intense and repetitive computations based on the discrete molecules involved and their interactions with each other. Of course, those interactions are based on simpler interactions, and so on to the smallest possible level. Even in cases where we don't oversimplify discrete things into continuous things and are being precise, we're nevertheless talking about myths. Poseidon's anthropomorphic motivations do not cause tsunamis, but do shifts in the Earth's plates truly cause them? The scientific explanation may be true relative to plate tectonics, which is true relative to science on a smaller level; still, none of it is just plain absolutely true until we're at the final level. I believe this is why we're constantly looking for theories of everything, because everything should be traceable back to a couple logical fundamentals. We want to rid ourselves of the mythology of having laws that may be true but aren't absolute.


We "know" that science is true not by thinking about it and absolutely proving it, but by determining that it is accurate through experience. That's the best we can do. But even when we are correct and truly determine that an object behaves in a certain way, we must remember that the object itself is a construction, and thus its behavior is as well. Theoretically, a certain myth could be accurate to any observable extent, and thereby as utilitarian as science. What but our process separates mythology from science? I suppose that we will move beyond helpful mythology only once we can narrow everything down to the fundamentals. And the question remains: can we ever know that we're there?

I would have thought we were there when we got to molecules. I would have thought we were there when we got to atoms. I would have thought we were there when we got to protons, neutrons, and electrons. I guess the problem with any of those levels is: why should there be more than one type of particle? That implies internal properties differentiating these fundamental things, which seems to suggest something smaller determining such properties. Perhaps, to go back to the view I was talking about in the math entries, the universe is a binary matrix. At any minimally small point, there is either something or nothing, and the arrangements from there are what give larger particles their identity. This is the point at which we can say, okay, we've found the smallest thing we have to find, and we know how the universe works. To look for anything smaller is unnecessary, because it will converge into that one larger thing that everything else is made of.