Only Joking

A woman goes to see a psychologist. He asks,

"What seems to be your problem?"

She stammers, "I think I might be a nymphomaniac"

"I see" said the doctor, "I can help you, but I must advise you, my fee is $120 an hour."

She replied, "That's not too bad, how much for all night?"

The humor is wrapped up in the unexpected irony, supported sublimely by the absurd. The art imbued in joking is of course, that they make us laugh. And who doesn't like to laugh? I had read where the three pillars to humor are those very three ingredients: the unexpected, irony and the absurd.

   Combine them, or use only one, and you've a joke. Puns, considered the lowest form of humor rely mostly on the absurd similarities of words conjectured in a way to change meaning. Slapstick also uses absurd situations along with the physical unexpected to deliver those belly laughs. My favorite, by far, is the element of the unexpected. Often as not the unexpected does not require cues, if it did then I guess we wouldn’t call it , um, unexpected.  Such is the case in a well-told Doctor joke:

The doctor tells his patient, "I think you have cancer" and the patient, angry with the diagnosis replies, "I want a second opinion" in which the doctor says, "OK, I think you're ugly too"

Now that was unexpected, I laugh at it still, (and that's me knowing the punch line, committing it to memory and writing it). This was a good example of the formula: an unexpected response in a common situation with a play on words, or irony, coupled by the absurdity of a doctor doing such a thing in a serious situation.

   That led me to the whole idea of serious and why we are often so aching for comic relief from our everyday lives? I'm undone, by my search to find the author who wrote "Humor is without terror, and terror is without humor" but suffice I get the point. When I am laughing, I have no worries, no concerns.  Conversely, when I'm afraid nothing can dissolve my fright or obsession with avoiding or getting away. Now I could get into the depths of why we human beings choose to worry and what personal need that services, but that'd take more than the space of a blog posting.  That, and frankly...it's not in the least bit funny.

So I'll end my morning observation with a humorous observation:

"Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time" ~ Chuck Klosterman

I guess.....One might conclude, the joke’s on us.