BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: COMEDY

"Since the world couldn't be stopped in its headlong rush, 
it was best just to laugh at it. The devil laughed, because
 he knew life had no meaning; the angels as they flew over, laughed too knowing what the meaning was."

from an unsigned obituary of Milan Kundera in 
The Economist (July 22nd, 2023)
**
MORT SAHL

Sahl, Mort
Reading Mallory's Morte
d'Arthur, said "Folks,
I ask you. Did Arthur's knights ever tell jokes?"
**
SEX QUEENS & SELF PARODY

In the movies, the sex queen, the Theda Bara, the Mae West, 
the Harlow, the Marilyn Monroe-- even the Garbo--always ends up
playing a parody of herself. It is as if the audience cannot stand for long this physical manifestation of its dream life. 
It must it a certain point relieve the inner tension, engendered by such stars through laughter. With considerable relief, the critics burst into print with the information that the symbol has become an extremely talented comedienne."

Richard Schickel in Movie Comedy, edited by Stuart Byron and Elizabeth Weis
**

OF TRIVIA AS A BASIS FOR HUMOR

“Which is trivia – the diamond or the elephant?  Any humorist must be interested in trivia, in every little thing that occurs in a household. It’s what Robert Benchley did so well that one of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919. Incidentally, you never got very far talking to Benchley about humor. He'd do a take off on Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Laughter. ‘ We must understand,’ he’d say, ‘that all sentences which begin with W are funny.’”

James Thurber, interviewed by George Plimpton and
Max Steiner. Writers at Work (New York: The Viking
Press, 1958).
**
RITA RUDNER

**
"The shortest distance between two points is
under construction."
                        Noilie Alito
**
THE BEST JOKES ARE DANGEROUS

"The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always 
rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are 
dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way 
truthful."
                               Kurt Vonnegut
**
AN EMAIL EXCERPT FROM WORD PLAY EXPERT T.CAMPBELL (July 31,2023)

"Magrites by Homer (maybe) was supposed to be as much a classic comedy as the Iliad and Odyssey were great epics. Aristotle himself said so. Not much is known about it except that the title character was such an utter buffoon that his name became an insult. A few quotations from it survive in other classic works, including this great line in Plato: “He knew many things, but he knew them badly.”
**
“A German joke is no laughing matter.”
               Mark Twain 
**
ON JOKE BOOKS AS REFERENCE WORKS

“A joke book is a work of reference, an example of DeQuincy’s literature of knowledge. A work of Humor belongs to the literature of power.”

Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker (November 28, 1942)
**
SATIRE & PARODY --TWO PERSPECTIVES

"There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you: satire, when you make fun of people richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off."

P.J. O'Rourke, in Age and Guile Beat and a Bad Haircut (1995)
**

"When Henry Kissinger can get the Nobel Peace Prize,
what is there left for satire."
                             Tom Lehrer
**
   
**
FAME IS FLEETING

Buster Keaton, in his autobiography --"My Wonderful World of Slapstick" (1960) wrote "Frank Tinney, whom many  theatrical people considered the greatest natural comedian of his day."
....
"During the years we were trying to figure out what made movie fans laugh, and why, there was an extraordinary silent-pictures comic who made many successful one-reel and two-reel pictures. His name was Larry Semon, and he was so weird looking that he could have posed either as a pinhead or a Man from Outer Space. His movies were combiations of cartoon gags, fantastic gags, and farcical plots."

Buster Keaton, with Charles Samuels . My Wonderful World of Slapstick (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1960)

**

(gag (n.2)
"a joke," 1863, especially a practical joke, probably related to theatrical sense of "matter interpolated in a written piece by the actor" (1847); or from the sense "made-up story" (1805); or from slang verbal sense of "to deceive, take in with talk" (1777), all of which perhaps are from gag (v.) on the notion of "to stuff, fill." Gagster "comedian" is by 1932.

from Online Etymological Dictionary)

COMEDY & THE TRACKS OF TIME

"Few genres are more desperately tied to the tracks of their times than comedy. It's still enjoyable to see Abbott and Costello joust over a linguistic misunderstanding, but an act such as 'Who's on First?' was much funnier in 1938 when audiences knew that it was mocking the nicknames of popular baseball players. Humor tends to wilt through the decades; 
what was once a bite becomes a sloppy kiss."

Rachel Syme,. "It's Not That Deep" in The New Yorker
(April 10, 2023).

**
LAUREL AND HARDY AT 9 A.M

Saps at sea 
Yes, I am talking to you.
Why aren't you rolling on the floor,
Holding your sides;
Laurel & Hardy 
Are eating sponge meatballs &
Your ribs ache
As you think "What fools
We mortals be."
Exquisite planets never laugh, &
Stars have sharp teeth,
Features that hold their own
In every storm.
Spaghetti made of rope.

Ha! Ha! 
Go the angels of our finer natures.
Laughter too displays sharp teeth,
Biting our universe in half.
No need to be so serious;
We are all saps at sea.
God made only one joke in His life,
Guess what He named it.
Look at the fine mess
He has gotten us into.

Louis Phillips