Dude, not funny

I've always found it somewhat peculiar that someone should claim that something isn't funny. Well, that's not entirely true. Some "jokes" are naturally not funny, and I'm sure dealing with such jokes and their tellers is an unfortunate experience that most if not all of us have had to endure. But I think when you tell someone that their joke isn't funny, you're not saying that it couldn't be funny. Any comic will tell you that the majority of a laugh comes from delivery more than content itself, for instance. Some punchlines rely on information not revealed in the telling of the joke, but in extra information, perhaps from the recent news or popular culture, and if one is not aware of such references they will not find the joke funny. When I say 'joke', I don't necessarily mean your typical gag, but rather any comedic venture, whether it's a joke or a sketch or a song or what have you. I'm not saying that every single failed joke can be rescued, to be clear, but rather that the problem with a failed joke isn't necessarily the subject matter in question.

Compare and contrast this, if you will, with criticisms not of jokes but of their subject matter. A common objection to certain types of comedy is that their subject matter isn't funny. I have a number of problems with this sort of claim, a few of which I'll briefly share with you.

First of all, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you criticise a joke for having subject matter which isn't funny, then you seem to be implying that there is subject matter that is inherently amusing. Yet, I have never been introduced to anything which I would say was considered universally funny. It's absurdly easy to pick holes in any such claims even if they were offered though. I'm not going to offer an example on the grounds that there would be little purpose in it, but if you insist on me giving it a go, write a comment with the funniest thing you know and I'll tell you why it's not funny, to someone at least.

If you were in an argumentative mood though, you might say that there may not be things inherently funny, but there are things which are inherently unfunny, which I think might be a stronger objection to make, even though I still disagree. If there are inherently unfunny things, I think they would fall into two categories: the mundane, and the offensive. The case of the mundane category is an easy one to despatch; the very fact that observational comedy grew to be so successful was that it took things considered relatively uninteresting and made them really funny.

The case of the offensive category is a little different, but not altogether so. For one thing, what is offensive to one person is not necessarily to another, and so if there are no inherently offensive topics, by extension there are no inherently unfunny topics. But, you might say, there are many topics so widely considered taboo that they might as well be considered inherently offensive. Suppose I grant it; two things come up. First of all, the more taboo a topic, the funnier it often is to talk about it. Indeed, it's been supposed that all great comedy has an element of offensiveness about it; the unexpected quality of the subject matter adds to its humour (but then, there's an old saying that dissecting a joke is like dissecting a frog in that the frog tends to end up dead by the end of it). Second of all, there are many ways to joke about an offensive topic. Indeed, if done in character or in a heavily sarcastic manner, jokes can be made about offensive topics in what would be considered a totally inoffensive manner.

This isn't an in-depth discussion particularly, just something I thought about one time that I thought I might write down. It's not really well planned-out or anything like that, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to take out of it. If anything, I would urge you to consider this: if there really is nothing that can't be made laughable in some way, doesn't that mean that everything has an element of humour to it? And if that's the case, maybe we should all take things a bit more lightly and be a bit more ready to laugh at what we might otherwise frown at. Just food for thought.