Give me some help here.

[Jenny_Jackson]

Ok, so most of the stuff I write is in the Humor Catagory. So, What the hell is humor? More to the point, what is funny to you?

The things I write are very much "In your face" comedy along the lines of The Marx Brothers slapstick rather than more intellectual comedy. So rather than the humiliation of failure (see Robert McMannis) or the sillyness of fan fic parody (which I've done) I go for the big "pratt fall", the "Slap in the face" and the "16 ton weight" falling from the heavens.

But this is just me. Think of the agony of reading and rereading a line of text, each time asking, "Is this funny?" not just to me but to some group of readers at large.

So, here's your chance. Tell me what do you find funny. Not situations, but the type of humor that tickles you to laughter.

JJ

 

[Misty_Morning]

I have been told that I have a rather dry and sarcastic sense of humor that often requires some form of limited intelligence to understand.

Unfortunately I think that will preclude a significant number of casual readers of this site. *giggle snort*

None the less, I also enjoy site gags and the obvious slap stick of other individuals. That way I don't have to think too hard and can conserve my neurons for balancing my check book.....

 

[Liar]

Snappy, dark and intelligent wit. The kind that you laugh at, so you don't have to wince.

 

[TheeGoatPig]

My sense of humor runs the gamit from intellectual to slapstick. Movies like Airplane and What's Up Doc get me to laugh and gaffaw, but so do black comedies as well.

 

[Liar]

My sense of humor runs the gamit from intellectual to slapstick. Movies like Airplane and What's Up Doc get me to laugh and gaffaw, but so do black comedies as well.

For some reason, I can never laugh at movies. I like them. I chuckle a bit but that popcorn spew moment never arrives. That only happens in either books or real life.

 

[rgraham666]

Looney Toons, Marx Brothers, Monty Python, Firesign Theatre.

I'm all over the map.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Yeah. I think you are getting the idea. Comics like Jerry Seinfeld are so bloody dry they leave me saying, "Huh?"

Mel Brooks is great slap stick with some classic lines like:

"Put...the candle...back." (Young Frankenstein)

"Ladies and gentleman, here comes our new town... nigger" (Blazing Saddles)

The Marx Brothers were more like a three-ring circus with immaculate timing.

The old vaudville actors I totally love - Jack E. Leonard, George Burns, Joe E. Brown etc. They spent years on stage in small, dimly lit theaters honing their craft.

Henny Youngman I can't really stand. He's NOT BLOODY FUNNY!!! Why?

Milton Berle was funny sometimes, mostly not. Why?

Ernie Kovaks, who most of you don't even remember, left me rolling on the floor. Early TV sight gags was his medium.

Jackie Gleason I've always enjoyed.

By WHY some and not others?

Woody Allen was at one point my total comedy idol. His early films, (Take the money and Run, Play it Again Sam, Sleeper, What's new PussyCat were classics. But what happened to him? Manhatten was exactly right. He isn't funny any more.

Is it that comedy has to leave behind anything serious to be funny and remain funny over the long haul??

 

[ungenderless]

Heh...I don't know how valuable my opinion will be, cos I've been told by multiple people that they can't tell when I'm joking or being serious. Think Tommy Lee Jones in "Men In Black".

I'm not too fond of the modern comedy. The "Grandma's Boys"-style that seems to have infiltrated it's way into almost every comedy released anymore. I'd rather listen to a comedian tell a joke than watch a skit involving someone accidentally cumming on a friend's mom.

I like subtle humor; things that happen in the backgrund or references to earlier events. Case in point: third Harry Potter movie. The mean aunt gets inflated, then Harry gets pissed off and leaves. In the background, you see her floating around in the sky. I loved that she was at the upper corner of the screen, instead of the camera focusing in on her. It gives the scene a sense of having layers.

I also enjoy it when people take an average, everyday thing and give it a hilarious spin. I suppose that's why I enjoy stand-up comedians so much. Case in point: Larry Miller's part on Weightlifting: "You can make every part of your body bigger with weights...except one. And that, by comparison, now looks SMALLER. The thinking man would be trying to lose weight to make it look bigger." Simple, but funny cos no one's ever presented that subject like that before. This kind of humor provokes me to think about normal things in new ways, and I appreciate that.

 

[oggbashan]

Books:
Jerome K Jerome: Three Men in a Boat
Thorne Smith: The Night Life of the Gods
Ernest Bramah: Kai Lung stories
Nino Culotta: They're a Weird Mob
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest

Audio:
Flanders and Swann: The London Bus; The Hippopotamus Song (Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud)
Gerald Hoffnung: The Bricklayer; French Windows; Festival of Britain
Peter Ustinov
Joyce Grenfell: The Nursery Class; Double Damask
Victor Borge: A Mozart Opera

Film:
Charlie Chaplin: Gas Street; The Great Dictator
Buster Keaton: The General

 

[rgraham666]

Just had a flash of something I find relentlessly funny. The Hot Shots movies.

They could do subtle and slapstick, sometimes in exactly the same scene.

Like the one where Charlie Sheen's character and his girl are reprising Lady And The Tramp in the foreground, and someone's getting a fish a la The Godfather in the background.

Or when the Iraqi and Charlie stop shooting at one another long enough to blow away the Energizer Bunny™.

Beautiful stuff.

 

[ungenderless]

Hot Shots! Rock on.

There are the classics that I have to, by law, respect. Monty Python & The Holy Grail. Spaceballs. But that's back when physical comedy was FUNNY.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Interesting what you are telling me. Comedy is media specific. How do you do a sight gag on the radio? How do you tell a long anticdote on television without losing the audience completely?

Abott and Costello's classic Who's on First routine was wonderful on radio, but really rather uninteresting on film.

WC Fields was a mean, miserly, cramudgen ("Anyone who hates children and dogs can't be all bad.") that came across as humor on the big screeen but would never have done so in real life.

Interesting.

 

[bronzeage]

This the funniest thing I have seen all year.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Hot Shots! Rock on.

There are the classics that I have to, by law, respect. Monty Python & The Holy Grail. Spaceballs. But that's back when physical comedy was FUNNY.

Are you saying that physical comedy isn't funny now? Or is it that it's just not being done now?

Physical comedy is very hard to do. The story goes that Buster Keton actually broke his neck doing a comedy pratt fall during the filming of The General. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid required several weeks an a couple hundred thousand dollars to film a single scene which was actually done by stunt doubles because the studio was afraid of the stars being injured.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

As a kid/child I found the Three Stooges funny, side splitting funny. Bill Cosby, Allen Sherman, Bill Dana and Johnny Carson to name a few, were hilarious.

Today though, there is not much in the way that I find funny, except situtational comedy. It's not the line that is delivered but the situtation it is delivered in.

It could be the most serious drama on TV but some lines which are ment to break the tension of the scene just crack me up.

To name a few - Hugh Lorry on House, Richard Dean Anderson on Stargate SG-1 have deliever lines that I just thought were all too funny in the situtation they just happen to be in.

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Are you saying that physical comedy isn't funny now? Or is it that it's just not being done now?

It's being done, it just isn't being done well. I haven't found too much physical comedy all that funny over the last, oh, ten years (or more, I think the last great comedy of this type was Naked Gun 2 1/2). There will be one or two laughs in one of the slapstick movies that you see all over the place lately (American Pie, Scary Movie etc), but it isn't wall to wall funny like the older movies used to be.

 

[Misty_Morning]

Jenny,

This is probably the funniest visual humor I have "seen" in words...

It's from the GLBT board, enjoy:

Shortly after I decided to be the real me I met, partied and after some coaxing followed a my choice of lust into the ladies restroom. We were having a very exciting time with her on the toilet and me on my knees when suddenly the door was opened and the young woman I was doing let out a gasp. I didn't know who was standing there but I knew I had to jump up and leave or at least make some kind of excuse but as I tried to pull my mouth away from that delectable treasure my new lover thrust herself up against my face while trying to get up from the toilet seat and her pubic hair became entangled in the dental braces I had gotten just the day before. My lover started screaming and grabbed my head which must have appeared to several women who had appeared that she was in the throes of an orgasm. I started to panic, I couldn't get loose. People started arriving and before long there was a crowd. Finally someone arrived with a pair of sissors and after my young lover calmed down I managed to extricate myself. I know a lot of people standing outside, who didnt know what was going on, must have wondered about the young woman with a large mustace who came rushing past from the ladies room.

Now this is funny!

 

[ungenderless]

It's being done, it just isn't being done well. I haven't found too much physical comedy all that funny over the last, oh, ten years (or more, I think the last great comedy of this type was Naked Gun 2 1/2). There will be one or two laughs in one of the slapstick movies that you see all over the place lately (American Pie, Scary Movie etc), but it isn't wall to wall funny like the older movies used to be.

Yeah, what he said.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

It's being done, it just isn't being done well. I haven't found too much physical comedy all that funny over the last, oh, ten years (or more, I think the last great comedy of this type was Naked Gun 2 1/2). There will be one or two laughs in one of the slapstick movies that you see all over the place lately (American Pie, Scary Movie etc), but it isn't wall to wall funny like the older movies used to be.

Maybe physical comedy (as opposed to sight gags - Woody Allen etc) is a dying art.

Much of it came from vaudville. Those people are all dead. Some of it came from Monty Python (all gone on to something else - one dead), Marty Feldman (dead), Richard Pryor (Lou Garrig's desease), Gene Wilder (doing nothing these days), the cast of Saturday Night Live (in the early days with John Balouchi, etc) all seem to either be gone off to do something else or dead.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Maybe another thing that's coming out of this is all the responses are based on Television and Movies with the exception of Ogg ( BTW).

Does this mean nobody is writing The Many Loves of Dobbie Gillis or Please Don't Eat The Daisys now a days?? Originally I had thought of the printed word when I started this thread.

I ran across Patrick McManus website yesterday with a rather cute little story from a book I read years ago. Here's the link

http://www.mcmanusbooks.com/merchandise/whats_in_a_name.htm

But I'm not really finding much like this anymore.

 

[ungenderless]

Maybe another thing that's coming out of this is all the responses are based on Television and Movies with the exception of Ogg ( BTW).

Does this mean nobody is writing The Many Loves of Dobbie Gillis or Please Don't Eat The Daisys now a days?? Originally I had thought of the printed word when I started this thread.

I ran across Patrick McManus website yesterday with a rather cute little story from a book I read years ago. Here's the link

http://www.mcmanusbooks.com/merchandise/whats_in_a_name.htm

But I'm not really finding much like this anymore.

Written humor? What is this thing that you speak of?

To be honest, the only funny literure I see at all are either list-related (Ex: You know you're a *blank* when), or short jokes. I suppose that's one reason I find your stories to be so refreshing. Heck, you even inspired me to put a little more humor in my stories.

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Maybe another thing that's coming out of this is all the responses are based on Television and Movies with the exception of Ogg ( BTW).

Does this mean nobody is writing The Many Loves of Dobbie Gillis or Please Don't Eat The Daisys now a days?? Originally I had thought of the printed word when I started this thread.

I ran across Patrick McManus website yesterday with a rather cute little story from a book I read years ago. Here's the link

http://www.mcmanusbooks.com/merchandise/whats_in_a_name.htm

But I'm not really finding much like this anymore.

I have only read one and a half books in the last twelve or so years.

Although I did enjoy Douglas Adams. Not just the Hitchhiker's Guide, but his Dirk Gently books as well. Good stuff that was.

I myself am trying to write a political thriller/comedy. But it's slow moving. I hope it ends up as funny (if a bit more American) as a Douglas Adams novel, though I'm not so sure I can match his skills in either writing or comedy.

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

Written humor? What is this thing that you speak of?

To be honest, the only funny literure I see at all are either list-related (Ex: You know you're a *blank* when), or short jokes. I suppose that's one reason I find your stories to be so refreshing. Heck, you even inspired me to put a little more humor in my stories.

Yeah, see? Ungenderless, there just isn't much of it anymore. I guess I have to begin a writing revolution

 

[Jenny_Jackson]

I have only read one and a half books in the last twelve or so years.

Although I did enjoy Douglas Adams. Not just the Hitchhiker's Guide, but his Dirk Gently books as well. Good stuff that was.

I myself am trying to write a political thriller/comedy. But it's slow moving. I hope it ends up as funny (if a bit more American) as a Douglas Adams novel, though I'm not so sure I can match his skills in either writing or comedy.

Goes to show how really hard writing comedy is, TGP

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Goes to show how really hard writing comedy is, TGP

Well, I'm really only two pages into it so far...

And I haven't been writing much of anything lately either...