Humor is like a pizza. Every has a different idea about what’s great and what’s terrible, and no two people will ever come up with the same recipe.
I was at a dinner party with relatives last night, and we decided to catch Mad Money on HBO. Everyone’s laughing uproariously at the delightful antics of Queen Latifah and friends … except me. I sat on the sofa with a dumpy, annoyed look on my face. I tricked my brain into a trance by chanting “this is not funny, this movie makes no sense, they’re just pandering to blue collar fantasies” over and over under my breath, just to take my mind off of how much I hated the Diane Keaton character and to hide my disappointment that she never gets her comeuppance. (Oh yeah… spoiler alert.) As you can imagine, I was the life of the party.
Meanwhile, I do realize that my own tastes in humor are rather unconventional. I don’t mean to say that I’m one of those people who think that Freddie Got Fingered was a misunderstood work of genius, though I assure you such people exist. (To bring this back to the pizza analogy, it’s the anchovy pizza.) I won’t, though, ever foist my MST3K DVDs on anyone until after I’ve conducted an indepth assessment based on 29 personality traits. I made that mistake once of watching the show with my wife, and all I got was an awkward two hours where she really was doing everything she could to show that nothing on the screen was interesting at all. That’s the bane of seeing humor you don’t find funny: it’s one of the most painful experiences on earth.
Eventually, to keep the peace, you and your cohorts must agree on a region that neither party finds uproariously funny, but are just funny enough so that everyone has a good time, at least until someone cracks open the case of Smirnoff’s.
I name that region “Adam Sandler.”
Which brings us to today’s webcomic review: Thingpart, by Joey Allison Sayers. To me, this comic is COMEDY GOLD. But I also laugh at obscure references to The Mothers of Invention, Lysistrata, and Monty Python’s “It’s” Man, so mileage may vary.
