A few serious words about humor, April 1st and DU

[JeffR]

Fair disclosure: As the proprietor of the DUzy Awards, an unofficial but evidently popular weekly thread in GD, I have an obvious penchant for satire, sarcasm and silliness. That penchant, no doubt, informs what follows. I make no apologies for it.

A number of posts today have taken exception to the predictably numerous April Fool's threads. Various discussions - only one of which I could stomach participating in - condemned these frivolous posts as "sick", "tedious" and "aggravating".

When I started writing and editing for my university newspaper way back when, the Vietnam War was ending, and the Reagan years were still a bad dream no-one had had yet. The campus radical movement was senescent, even as some of its most cherished goals were being haltingly realized.

As angry as some of us were over outrages we had grown up witnessing - the horrors of the backlash against the fight for civil rights, the daily body count from Southeast Asia, the police riots in Chicago in '68, the criminality of the Nixon years, and so much more - we knew that a page had been turned.

We also knew that whatever gains had been made, a clear demarcation remained between what we perceived as Bad (the Establishment) and Good (everything opposed to it). There was little or no dissent among our ranks about that. At the same time, most of us took no small amount of pleasure in mocking the deadly seriousness of that small remaining group of dedicated Trotskyites and Maoists, grimly clutching their baseball bats as they trundled off to the latest scantily-attended protest over something they probably didn't remember by the following Tuesday.

Throughout those years, our touchstone was the writing of Hunter S. Thompson, which continued to burn with a magnesium fury long after St. Ronnie and the Rodeo of the Cynics had swept into power and gleefully begun dismantling 200 years of constitutional progress. Dr. Thompson was also, and not at all incidentally, funny. Painfully so, sometimes. Eventually, evidently, the pain became too much for him, and he elected to leave this life. His many ardent fans could only gasp at the magnitude of our loss.

Sometime later, Molly Ivins, Garrison Keillor and a handful of other writers would come along to keep railing against the outrages of the Establishment with candor, grace and, yes, humor. Molly, too, is gone now, and we are immeasurably poorer for her passing.

OK, OK, JeffR: get to the point. What does this have to do with DU and April Fool's Day?

A lot.

If we fail to recognize that humor is a coping mechanism, a way to articulate the bleakness and occasional hopelessness that color our thoughts, if we fail to recognize that it is a way to telegraph to like-minded individuals that we're all in this together, that we get the non-joke reality we try - sometimes desperately - to make jokes from, if we fail to see that, often, humor is our final alternative to absolute and irrevocable pessimism, well then my friends, the terrorists have truly won.

And of course by terrorists I mean, emphatically, conservatives. Not that anyone in Saudi Arabia or wherever who might be plotting to blow up my subway car tomorrow morning rates too highly with me, but I fear and loathe good ol' All-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's sons a lot more.

So, does that mean all the April Fool's threads were funny? No, though some of them were damned funny.

Does that mean that any quip posted on DU today or any other day is automatically worthwhile? No, although a lot of them are.

Does that mean that everything is fodder for humor? Absolutely.

A quote variously attributed to Alexander Pope and John Gay states:

Life is a jest
And all things show it.
I thought so once,
And now I know it.

Don't like the April Fool's threads, or threads that try to make light of the absurdities of the tragic era we inhabit? Don't click on them. Leave that to those of us who never appreciate a laugh more than when things are looking their worst and almost all hope is gone.

Thanks.

[bonito]

1. Laughter is our escape hatch

I guess I knew it, but now I'm aware of it, thanks Jeff

[hyphenate]

2. Humor has many faces

and is of many minds. What appeals to one, does not necessarily appeal to another. If someone can't appreciate the humor in one area, they might enjoy another area of it completely.

I haven't hung around DU too much today, but it's a day of fun, a day to forget the pain, the horror and the seriousness of the world. I will bet that even in the trenches, soldiers played a few tricks and jokes today as much as the rest of us.

Back in September, 2001, a friend of mine watched, nearly mesmerized, every single time they showed the explosions at the WTC. Her stress level soared, but she couldn't take her eyes off it. The human body is not designed for such neverending cataclysm. If we do not find time to relax and unwind, we suffer from a wide variety of illnesses, diseases, and chronic stress.

Give everyone a little latitude on a day like today. Let them blow off some steam. We're only human. We can't fight tomorrow if we can't laugh today.

[JeffR]

3. You said it better than I did, hyphenate

and I thank you.

[hyphenate]

5. Oh, balderdash!

I was just agreeing with you!! :blush:

[immoderate]

4. Yes.

The saying I use: "Nothing is above humor."

And you get it.

--IMM

[Lex]

6. I don't think people objected to them in general, but the Lounge

was the most appropriate place, given the whole reason for the Lounge's existence in the first place.

[hyphenate]

9. It's the turning up of

a post in the unlikeliest of forums that makes it even more pertinent to the April Fool's Day scenario. If posts were relegated to the Lounge only, what fun would that be for those who are taken in by something on another forum?

One year on another board, I was the mastermind to changing the entire website into a giant April Fool's joke. Forums were renamed, switched around and hilarity ensued. It's only when people actually fall for the joke that it becomes a good one--we can tell jokes in the Lounge any old day, but it's succumbing to a whit of a joke on a different forum that makes it memorable.

Things will go back to normal tomorrow, but we will likely not forget the jokes and humor given to the site from those who took time to make some fun from it today.

[JeffR]

10. And I disagree with that

I've seldom posted in the Lounge in 4 years on DU, though I admire some of the absurdist humor there - which occasionally makes its way into the DUzy Awards - but I sincerely believe if everything snarky or breezy or downright silly posted on DU automatically gets shunted to the Lounge, it cheapens the Lounge and DU as a whole.

[Lex]

I don't think everything snarky or breezy or silly gets shunted to the Lounge

nor should they, but someone had to make a call about the management of numerous April Fools threads, just like they make a decision about say, all the Superbowl threads on Superbowl day, and they decided apparently to move them to the Lounge.

I just don't think it was a grand statement about the use of humour in general.

[Danascot]

7. Conservatives are notorious

for their marked lack of any sense of humor.

Humor isn't just next to godliness, it's an essential part of it.

[EFerrari]

8. He'll be here all week. Try the veal.

lol

Right on, Jeff. We need to get over ourselves to get on with each other and with the work.

:applause:

[wryter2000]

29. Veal???!!

You suggest I eat veal? I'm highly offended.

:sarcasm: for anyone who might have missed it.

I haven't been able to be online much since my knee surgery. I'm very sorry I missed yesterday's posts. I remember my first April Fool's on DU and how much I enjoyed it. How many rs are there in Rabrrrrrr, anyway?

[EFerrari]

30. How are you, wryter2000? I had meetings yesterday and missed

most of it, too.

:hi:

[wryter2000]

37. I'm doing very well

Thanks for asking. :hi:

I get better by the hour, but it's hard to sit at the computer a lot. I'm hoping for some juicy congressional hearings to watch while I'm off work. :evilgrin:

[blondeatlast]

11. A brazilian thanks from me! Agreed. I need to keep my sense of humor now more than ever,

and I'm perfectly capable of not clicking on threads I'm not interested in.

If I lose my ability to laugh over even a bad joke, I may as welk pack it in and that's a luxury I can't afford.

[Swamp Rat]

21. Muito obrigado de mim também.

:D

Vc disse um "brazilian thanks," ney? :)

[NanceGreggs]

12. Years ago, I saw a documentary ...

... about a small band of Jews who had hidden themselves in a sewer for almost three years during the Nazi occupation.

The woman interviewed, one of the group, described the job that each had taken on: a man who went into the streets above each day to forage for food, a former teacher who kept the children occupied with history and math lessons, a man who spent his days listening for news at a shallow part of the tunnel that sat just below a town square where people gathered to talk.

"But you haven't mentioned your own husband and his job," said the interviewer.

The woman smiled and said, "He had the most important job of all. He was the comedian, who kept us all laughing when things seemed at their worst."

[brer cat]

13. I will never forget some of the last words my mother spoke

to her three daughters when she was dying from ovarian cancer. "It's so much easier when you girls laugh."

I will forever treasure the minister who told us that the horrors that we saw would dim in our memory, but the moments that we laughed would be remembered forever. And that is true.

Thanks, JeffR. We need to keep the humor in our lives.

[Schema Thing]

14. Dave Chappelle is funny. Dane Cook is not.

Dane Cook is tedious and aggravating.

nuf said.

[Gregorian]

15. Thanks for the reminder.

I grew up without humor. Or I should say without producing humor. I watched Laugh-in. My father loved the Honeymooners. But I have absolutely no ability to produce it. I hang out on a wildly humorous website. Every morning before heading to DU I run over there. And laugh. I laugh at brilliant plays on words. Twists on morality. Obscene and sacrilegious behavior, done with intelligence. But I am empty. I honestly don't know why. I suppose it comes from being raised by parents who came from poverty and sadness. But that's not always the case under those circumstances. So I watch others. And I wonder how long it will be before I am bright enough to play life. Not just live it. And use it like you have said so well.

And I thank you for reminding me that I can be that way.

[blondeatlast]

16. Let's hear it for amateur humor! There's a lot of DUers who may have no other outlets

for their attempts. Maybe their stuff isn't great, but I applaud the effort--and that comes from one who has had my most clever bits completely ignored for the DUzies... (tapping foot, mumbling...)

[Lugnut]

17. K&R

Sometimes you just need to laugh. In my 61 years I have not lived through a more horrific era than this. I thought the JFK assassination and the Nixon years would be the worse I'd ever see. I was so naive.

[Horse with no Name]

18. My problem today was that I had very little time to read DU

and clicking on threads that appeared to be good news left me wanting.
I wasted what precious time I had today on April Fools jokes.
Now I don't think that I am lacking in a sense of humor, but it was disappointing that I came here to catch up and ended up with nothing more than I would have gathered from reading the comic page.
If it was one of those all-day perusing days, maybe I wouldn't have minded.
Some of them you couldn't tell if they were jokes or not until you read through them...simply because the volume is being turned up on this administration and we are hoping to start seeing some fallout.
I did skip by the obvious ones, was stung by some of the not-so-obvious ones.

[Bucky]

19. Um, don't idolize Hunter Thompson too much here. He was a virulent rightwing conservative.

April Fools!

[Swamp Rat]

22. HAHA!

You made me click. :D

[aikoaiko]

20. Its just one freaking day a year. too many people out their who have to appear ernest

and bash the april fool threads.

[eridani]

23. Humor requires distance in order for people to respond to it

Seattle comedian Peggy Platt has an absolutely hilarious routine about slipping in the bathtub, dislocating her hip, and being unable to get out. She was able to holler loud enough for a neighbor to call 911, and finally was able to pull herself over the side, where she promptly tripped and fell in the cat litter box.

I estimate it probably took her a year from the actual event to make a comedy routine about it. When you get a year older, in a sense you are no longer that person you were a year ago. Now she can laugh about it, and if you aren't her you can laugh with her.

Any time anybody tries to be funny about anything, you can absolutely guarantee that at least a few people are going to be too close to the subject matter to see it as funny. Not a reason to stop doing humor, IMO.

[CrazyOrangeCat]

24. Kicked

Please keep us laughing!

:rofl:

[Hubert Flottz]

25. I have a great deal of respect for anyone, who is still laughing in

America right now.

[Laurab]

26. K&R -

I am so grateful that I grew up in a large family, that could find humor in most anything - if not for humor, what options are there? Despair, always being unhappy - THAT would wear me down. As the book (or probably several books) say - "laughter is the best medicine". I believe that with all my heart.

[deutsey]

27. "Humor in the Holocaust"

http://www.holocaust-trc.org/holocaust_humor.htm

The very idea of humor during the Holocaust may at first seem jarring—incongruous but not funny! In Western culture there is a long tradition of prejudice against humor, especially in connection with anything as tragic as the Holocaust. Tragedy, on stage or in real life, is serious, even sublime, while humor and comedy are "light." In drama, when comedy appears within tragedy, it is usually discounted as mere "comic relief."

But the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, and other dramatists took their comedy more seriously than that. They realized that comedy is not "time out" from the real world; rather it provides another perspective on that world. And that other perspective is no less valuable than the tragic perspective. As Conrad Hyers has suggested, comedy expresses a "stubborn refusal to give tragedy . . . the final say."1

For the Greeks and Shakespeare, too, because the world presented in comedy was the same all-embracing world as in tragedy, no subject was off-limits, not even the gods. In Aristophanes' The Frogs, for example, the demigod Dionysus, on a journey to the underworld, has to pay for his passage like anybody else; he must even help row the boat across the infernal lake, and that makes his backside sore.

Not only do tragedy and comedy look at the same world, but they both focus on its problematic side. Here they share a similarity with religion. Most problems involve evils of some kind, and a major function of religion, comedy, and tragedy is to help us deal with evil. Many people think of comedy as irrationally optimistic and therefore frivolous, but that is a misconception. As Mark Twain remarked, "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."

MORE...

[TZ]

28. laughter is the best medicine...

and like a good friend of mine who taught me the power of humor, we often need to laugh to keep from crying. Why do you think that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are so popular?

[BellaLuna]

31. True, laughter is the best medicine

However, if one attempts to be humorous a bit of originality would help. There's a difference between humor and trying to just jump on the bandwagon in an attempt to get attention.

There's a reason why Stewart and Colbert are so popular - they make us laugh even though the bullshit they are talking about should make us cry. They are also extremely witty and original in how they present their material - hence they are funny and we are able to laugh.

What was lacking in many posts yesterday that made many posters say 'enough already' was the originality and wit were missing and the attempts at humor become nothing more than spamming the boards.

[TZ]

32. welcome to DU!

And you make excellent points, although I did kind of ignore a lot of the shall we say, feeble attempts at humor.:hi:

[BellaLuna]

33. Thanks!

I've been around a while but don't post much.

I ignored most of the lame attempts too and everyone should have.. I just can understand the other side this issue.


:hi:

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

34. Since Skinner himself locked at least two or them then

maybe you should take this up with him. (I'm assuming that he locked them because they were strictly April Fools Jokes, but I could be wrong. :shrug:)

[ms liberty]

35. K&R n/t

[The Count]

36. Top 100 April Fool hoaxes - with special fondness for #6:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/
#6: Nixon for President
In 1992 National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation program announced that Richard Nixon, in a surprise move, was running for President again. His new campaign slogan was, "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." Accompanying this announcement were audio clips of Nixon delivering his candidacy speech. Listeners responded viscerally to the announcement, flooding the show with calls expressing shock and outrage. Only during the second half of the show did the host John Hockenberry reveal that the announcement was a practical joke. Nixon's voice was impersonated by comedian Rich Little.