Categories of Funny

I believe deeply in the worth of frivolous enterprises. I was once horrified to hear a young man say that not only did he have no hobbies but he recommended that no one have hobbies and thought ill of anyone who did, because they (hobbies) were frivolous. I thought extremely ill of him for saying so.

Frivolity is the only thing that makes life worth living. All seriousness has as its ultimate purpose the making way for more and better frivolity. When we ask that there be no war, we ask it so that children can play, and old men can dream. When we ask that there be no hunger we do so because it's so hard to waste time when you're starving. And so on.

So I am proud to say I have frivolous hobbies. My favorite of these is the collecting of categories of funniness and sample instances of the different categories I find.

There are of course, two main classes of funny. These are the Funny Ha Ha, and the Funny Peculiar. There is a great deal of overlap between these, as Steven Wright and The Darwin Awards demonstrate. But no slaughter begins without a good whack, as they say, so we begin here, with this good clumsy distinction cleaving the temple of our unsuspecting obsession.

Throughout the literature you will find it acknowledged that no one knows what makes for Funny Ha Ha. Not only that, but no one is going to know, if by know you mean in a certified scientific way, because there is no certifiably scientific human out there who wants to stick his or her neck out to say they know what makes stuff funny to laugh and what doesn't, because they can all visualize that dreadful career moment when they haul out the A material at the Symposium, or what their calculations showed was the A material, and they bomb.

They bomb. And they all know they will bomb. Every idiot in history who has ever thought he knew what was funny has gotten up on a stage and he or she has bombed. There is no exception. The lucky ones manage to get off the stage before flames burst out of their ears. The unlucky ones explode amid cries of "You suck!" and "You Stink!" and they break out in boils, and the ghost of Michael Richards Present sucks their hearts out. Later they may succeed at not bombing but by then they will have forgot all the theory they brought to it.

What is not commonly acknowledged however, but what is equally mysterious, is that there is no scientific explanation of the Funny Peculiar Category either. No one has been able to qualify and quantify the precise properties by which an item of the universe enters into the Funny Peculiar, and gets Funny Peculiar Juice on it, and so becomes Funny Peculiar itself. "You call that peculiar? You stink!" It's not as often heard as it once was, since the Side Show and the Freak Show have largely become camp.

But there was a time when any year at a dozen fairs and circuses near you had Side Show exhibits where constant heckling could be heard. "That's not weird! That's just lame!" "That's fakey! I want my money back! I came here to see real freaks!"

On the other hand, who knew that Fejee Mermaid would be such a hit?