“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny).”
At 3 a.m. magazine, a wonderfully varied and provocative essay on the works of Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.
What struck me in this essay is the discussion of humor and geometry in the works of Toussaint and in general.
I’ve been struggling with writing scenes that are funny without being necessarily sophomoric and frequently I resort to what I can only describe as “noir slapstick.” This humor, I like to think is “dark” and depends on things snowballing out of control, again and again, much like a “self-repeating mechanism.”
A lot of ridiculous thing can happen when a body, with all its emotive energy is introduced into a certain space. A young man renting an apartment can set the scene for a wide array of hilarious debacles because, for one simple reason the landlord-tenant relationship is entirely dependent on space and repetition. That tense “relationship”, based on nothing warm or loving, is an instant set-up for a joke, or a series of them.
Two people on a date create their own architectures of side-splitting tension and barely-concealed hysterics. Mistakes can be made again and again, like embellishments of the landscape, which become only funnier with repetition. Every bad date I’ve been on, thanks to the healing powers of time strikes me as the most hilarious thing ever, especially if the bad date had unexpectedly pleasant results. Which they usually didn’t have.
Perhaps we’re all over-thinking it. Or at least I am. But I do think that really funny writing, or the kind of humor that opens you up to the frivolous glory of all the stupid things around us, is hard to pull off.
What do you think is funny? And especially what’s funny in writing? And why does it seem so hard to be really funny when you write?
(One thing I know, we can all learn a lot from Funny Women.)
For instance, in writing about humor here I’ve managed to be completely humorless which, in some ways, proves someone’s point.
