Humor and You

Reading about speech play made me realize how often we take for granted the absurdities that arise when we try to communicate with each other. The idea that a single utterance can have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of meanings simply boggles my mind. When you stop and think about it, however, every thing we say involves some mental grasping and some imagination. Since language is a symbolic system, we can't help but give different meanings to things, and often this is where speech play comes to play (so to speak).

Obviously humor is central to the idea of speech play, and much like the meanings of words, humor itself can be interpreted differently. There are the things that are intentionally funny and then there are the times when we say or hear something that was never meant to be funny. Comedy is fascinating because of the issue of aspect. What is funny to one person is not funny to everyone because the symbolic meaning of the joke could have no context in one person's life. I watched a lot of comics this week in preparation for this post (and also because I tend to that in my spare time anyway) and I figured I would post a couple of things and analyze them a bit.

The first video I looked at was from Jim Gaffigan, one of my favorite comedians:

His humor is based around the idea of taboo. By taboo I don't mean that his jokes are necessarily dirty, or about "classically" taboo subjects, but his humor comes from saying things we just wouldn't normally say. By pointing out the absurdity of using one phrase to symbolically suggest one thing instead of another, he gets the audience to understand the sometimes arbitrary rules of meaning in our language. A good example of this is from the very beginning of the video: "If you eat a whole pizza you say, 'Wow. You were hungry." If you eat a whole cake people are like, 'You got a problem.'"

My second example of humor is one that shows how important personal aspect is to meaning. If you were at the game on Saturday standing near a Wolverine fan (God help them), you probably noticed that this next event probably didn't make them smile (I'm sure the score didn't help either).


This wasn't the exact pun that Officer Tim McCarthy used this week (I believe it was something like "When it is wet outside it is important for the driver to remain dry"), but few things can get a Notre Dame student section going like a good/horrible pun about safe driving. If thousands of raucous, inebriated students shushing each other to hear a public service announcement about the perils of alcohol isn't funny, I don't know what is. And that is why personal aspect is so vital to meaning, and imperative when approaching everything from a conversation to a simple knock knock joke.