12.5.05

oh for a good laugh…

Any given Thursday, humour would rate as the weirdest known human response. A true mystery in the truest sense of the word. I mean just look at all the things that make us laugh. Most of them are ugly and deformed. Abnormally large genitalia for instance, or a drunkard, a slut, an idiot, these are just some of the ingredients that constitute popular humour. Most of them do not measure up to our morals, values and all those intangible objects we swear to live by. Come to think of it, it’s almost like God. As if, man created religion and God at one end of the continuum to counter his fear regarding his uncertain place in the universe, and at the other end, he brewed humour to deal with the day to day reality. By reality, I mean things that don’t fit as neat little bricks in our wall of reason, things that fall out of line, things that don’t make sense. Or to put it more correctly, things that make a weird kind of sense which threatens to bring down the very edifice of understanding. Things that scare us shitless, things that sneak up over the shoulder of our consciousness and whisper wickedly, what if there’s no reason, what if you are just a freak of universe, what if there’s no eventuality, no fate, no destiny, what if there’s nothing that can be considered sacred. You figure? And so we laugh, it’s still better than going insane though. Misfortune, death, sorrow, injustice, incomplete endings, goblins, Woody Allen, they never made much sense now, did they? Yet they do exist, right there in our face. We can’t duck down, ignore them or pretend they’re not there. And so we laugh. Or pray. Depending on how old or how sharp we are.

Humour’s displayed right up (or down) there in the chamber of horror, in close vicinity of crime, anger, revenge and psychosis. And yet, it’s a clever little bastard. Did you know that ‘Mad’ (the magazine) escaped a ban once when American puritans were out to demolish anything they considered vulgar, irreverent and detrimental to a healthy society? It’s a vague analogy my friend. Although humour has the same cathartic effect on human psyche, it somehow escapes being categorized as a deformity. Rather, psychoanalysts look at humour as the sign of a healthy human psyche, meaning thereby, a psyche that can contain neuroses without threatening establishment and wielding chaos.

The thumb rule, anything that doesn’t make sense (you know what I mean by that by now) is worth making a joke out of. And if the joke’s on someone else, it’s even funnier; sprinkled with a frugal dose of sadism, just the way you’d want it. The farther the object of joke, the louder and more unconscientiously you can laugh.

Anyway, since I was out to write a funny article and since this doesn’t figure as one, I would leave it right here, hanging on in quiet desperation, craving for a rightful conclusion. So it doesn’t make any sense and pass on as weirdly humorous for the real sick minds. What a laugh. It’s killing me. And the joke’s on you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Play with our minds, Mr Andy Kaufman. We know you're hiding in there. Enjoy your stay. But will you please leave the paradise the way it was, when you're done.

Anonymous said...

You write very well...

I read some Asimov short story once that ends with the characters (and Multivac) discovering that jokes were invented by aliens; and humour was is just a way for extra terrestrial intelligent life to keep tabs on human intelligence.
That is why jokes are mostly modifications of older jokes and new jokes aren't funny after a while.

Manish Bhatt said...

Anon: Yup, whenever humour waltzes in step with bizarre, the man on the moon is bound to be around.

Trun: Thanx dude! Asimov could be right y'know.