Just Joking > Morreall

First, I must say FINALLY. Just Joking was everything I thought Morreall’s snore-inducing explanations of humor and humor theories was going to be and should have been. I found this article very entertaining to read, because the authors themselves actually used their senses of humor in order to write through the lens of humor. This tone and input of funny blurbs was enough to keep at least a half-interest in what was being said. It’s as if they read Morreall and went “yikes…poor bloke. We should probably avoid that,” and used it as a springboard to actually BE funny in book about humor! Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the reading were the jokes and one-liners at the bottom of each page, just motivating you to finish reading the page so you could look down and receive a chuckle as a reward. My favorites included:

            “Imagine if there were no hypothetical situations?”

            “People often say to me, ‘What are you doing in my garden?’”

            “I ordered a wake-up call the other day. The phone rang and a woman’s voice said,

“What the hell are you doing with your life?

I am a fan of witty, clever one-liners that either set you up for one thing and then completely and instantly turn you around, as well as short one-liners that take a second to think about. But that’s just me. Now back to the actual reading assignment.

I think one of the best things the authors did was to give such a strong introduction about how what they were about to do could often make jokes not funny and then linking it to the “dissecting a frog” metaphor. They made this intro amusing and conversational, as well as faux-apologetic, making sure we understood that even after all the fun and games we might not get any more fun text to read. But all this does is prepare us to expect nothing so that when they do write entertaining explanations and examples of the Superiority, Incongruity, Ambivalence, and Release Theories of humor we still think, “Oh, well that’s still WAY better than how Morreall put it!”

Notably, my favorite section of this assignment versus the way Morreal put it was the Relief Theory. The authors’ use of Freud was much more interesting and permeated the theory more, showing how scientists really used to mix the mental and physical aspects of humor in completely unproven ways and ideas. The belief that everything humorous stems from a sexual desire or fetish is a very interesting concept, but come on…really? At least we could laugh at Freud in the context of this paper!