This Post Is Not Funny

 This post is not funny, although it theorizes about comedy in a way where you as a reader have to accept the premise that I can be funny, know what humor is, and understand it.

A lot of people think they're funny. And yet, many people cannot recognize a joke being made. Many of the people who think they're funny are not coming from the sort of "comedy nerd" background of a person who watched hours of stand-up comedy and sketch comedy as high schoolers and honed their skills making jokes on the internet. Most people's idea of humor is premised more on social cohesion, where people laugh because they want to get along with each other, rather than some kind of unexpected disconnect where expectations are short-circuited. So much of life is about getting along with people, and finding common ground, and yet people who think of themselves as joke-meisters might find themselves in circumstances where people who have no reason to perceive them in that way bomb horribly. Working as a substitute teacher, I've found that expecting kids to understand I am making jokes is a fool's errand. Dan Licata, whose stand-up comedy has made me laugh incredibly hard, did a stand-up special recorded in front of teenage boys, on the premise that they're the target audience for his vulgar, Jackass-indebted comedy, and he didn't fare too well either, even given that he had over me the fact that he could swear and talk about sex, which I can't when working in my own professional capacity.

I suspect that in this social cohesion vs. cognitive dissonance framework lies the great number of our problems as a society. The social cohesion model of humor tends to bonding over an in-group or out-group model, and so trends conservative, and then it grows in power as people agree with each other and this idea of "common sense."

What's interesting to me, and maybe this is barely even related, is that a lot of people who trend conservative are increasingly becoming disenchanted with Trump as the figurehead of the conservative movement. And like, Trump has been a target of professional comedians for years. Actually decades. But there is a part of me that suspects that kind of joke - and here I mean the actual funny kind, but I'm not trying to claim that late-night TV talk shows are funny - is just qualitatively not the sort of thing that everyone gets. Like, I think conservatives struggle with cognitive dissonance, even understanding the concept of it as a term that describes what they experience. These recognitions of hypocrisy, double-standards, whatever, the sort of ironies which so much of what I would call actual humor hinges upon.

I'm not trying to say "this is why conservatives aren't funny," because, you know, I love Norm MacDonald, whatever; plenty of people are funny, and plenty of people who are liberals or leftists or whatever you want to call it can be humorless too. It's not a partisan trait. People of any political affiliation can not understand jokes, and yet think they have a sense of humor because of their ability to get along with people who are similarly doctrinaires. I think specifically conservatives have to confront their cognitive dissonance now because they're in power and are doing a horrible job. 

There's always going to be this underlying tension between people who can write jokes and people who simply love to laugh, and it's not necessarily going to be acknowledged within a society that can construct a theater with a stage where a performer has an audience. That situation creates a dynamic where all participants are affirmed. Where things get sorted out in actuality is away from the crowd: Can you amuse yourself when no one is watching. Laughing at others is one thing, but being able to laugh at oneself is different, and being able to laugh at oneself and then grow as a person or become smarter when you realize you're being dumb is another thing altogether. And I think that the latter might actually be dependent on being able to understand and appreciate jokes even when they're coming from people that you're not putting on a pedestal wherein you give yourself permission to laugh along with them.