(301): the majority of my texts from you are at 3 AM & consist of either "I'm drunk", "you're asian", or "bratwurst".I laughed my ass off when I read that. Bratwurst non sequitur.
I first saved this post as a draft at least a year ago, but I didn't have anything to put in the body of the damn thing. I figured if I left it there, I'd see it whenever I scanned through the drafts, and eventually I'd think of some kind of answer to the question. Finally I have one: absurd humor is like play.
A couple weeks ago I asked about play at a "Thinkrs & Drinkrs" gathering. My question was: "How do you play? Alone or with others? Physically or mentally?" I expected to hear about musical instruments and sports, but the question had a life of its own. One of the most useful responses was John Heaney's: that he doesn't set aside time to play, rather, he's constantly playing by choosing to improvise the way he gets routine tasks done. Drive a different route to work, see different buildings, think of new possibilities. Innovation happens when you think about the problem in front of you in a new way because you were exposed to something totally unrelated. So a functional definition of play is that it's an activity that seeks to provide these mental collisions between unrelated thoughts. This is very much in line with the Stephen Nachmanovitch post I quoted a long time ago about its importance in science.
Absurd humor is also a collision of unrelated thoughts. I'm drunk, you're asian, bratwurst. The outcome is laughter instead of innovation, but the mechanism is the same. It jiggles the brain the same way a flash of insight does. And I'm addicted to that.
Have you read Freud's "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious"? I think you may agree with him...or he agrees with you.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea Freud wrote about humor. It's not in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis that I still have from college. I'll look it up. There's probably a used copy somewhere on Amazon for a buck.
ReplyDeleteIf I can find my copy I'll bring it with me on Wednesday...if you're planning on being there. Otherwise I will try to find it and when Robert takes photos of you and the missus he can give it to you then.
ReplyDeleteIt's not all that enlightening. It pretty much concludes that jokes typically are funny if they have a punchline that is unexpected. Duh. But then I was always a Freudian so I cut him lots of slack. Never was a Jungian, no not ever.