The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application. — Joseph Epstein, Familiar Territory
At first glance, one might be inclined to deem our current epoch humorless. Perhaps it is a feature of humorless humans that they make up societies that are abundant with comedic material. It is, in fact, downright difficult to conceive of a world without plenty to laugh at. Our species appears to be unique in its sense of, and appetite for, comedy. Being funny and having a sense of humor are undoubtedly essential biological attributes — the spiritual and psychological benefits of laughter are also virtually undisputed.
So if we live in an unfunny world, it must be that people have lost their funny bone. That, or the true jokers have ceased to bring the comedy to our attention.
Apparently this is what we get when that happens:
It is the lack of funny that I find offensive here. When I say offensive, I simply mean it repulses me. It should be locked away in a YouTube cringe compilation where decent folk can be spared its contents.
I’m not sure how much of an issue this has become. I’ve been blissfully ignorant of the news these past couple weeks — and, naturally, all the smarter for it — I know it’s been used in a couple of Trump ads. Perhaps most have shrugged it off. But insofar as the offense has exceeded les cringé, I thought I’d suggest appreciating this latest reminder of why we’re winning. They are not funny. At all.
“Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. The question of whether a man expresses himself in a grotesque or laughable phraseology, or in a stately and restrained phraseology, is not a question of motive or of moral state, it is a question of instinctive language and self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe would not maintain that the more funny ‘Gulliver’ is in its method the less it can be sincere in its object. The truth is, as I have said, that in this sense the two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.” — G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
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