My fears
My fears are a little to numerous to list in this limited space, so I’ll concentrate on two. My fear for humor and my fear for society and the children it creates.
Humor seems to be becoming almost strictly a weapon these days. Family Guy-type humor that is based on putting something or somebody down. I know that ain’t a new process by any means, but I watch Family Guy and its ilk and just get bummed out by how painful humor is getting, how nasty and mean-spirited it seems, or seems to be trending over the years, thanks to our anti-blessing, television.
If humor becomes strictly an attack weapon how are we supposed to laugh at ourselves without feeling crappy?
Ouch,
LWIII
True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. ~ Thomas Carlyle
Allow me to consult my guru on this. He says, from the inorganic comes the organic and from the organic the fabricated. Now, in laughter, a mechanism operates within the organism (the fabricated is left aside, since intelligence is an oxymoron anyway). When laughing, the body shakes and tries to correct balance, for then it can while otherwise it cannot. This balance is, let’s say, the intensity of life (maximized during war), or in Bergson’s philosophy itself, ‘intuition of duration’. Being in touch with duration is autopoiesis (a word I believe derived from his work somewhere in Scandinavia). It is, according to Creative Evolution (post mortem, 1947), “differentiation, immediateness, actuality, continuousness, change, equality, newness and simplicity”. Just what writers need, I guess.
http://www.authorama.com/laughter-1.html
Thanks Ron, and for the link to Bergson. According to P.Gl Wodehouse, humor is the kindly contemplation of the incongrous. Laughter, who knows, it’s us gettign our ya yas out.
Glad to know somebody out there is thinking about laughter!