LARB Digital Edition: Humor

By Los Angeles Review of Books

Comedians really want to make us cry. The best reaction they can hope to elicit is tears laughter, sure, but it’s the tears they’re after. Like almost every other human emotion, there is an emoji depicting this phenomenon online: a round yellow face with an absurdly broad, open smile, eyebrows furrowed and eyes pressed closed, a pendulous teardrop dangling from each corner. It’s the face comedians want to see most, along with Spit-take Emoji” and Peeing-my-pants-laughing Emoji.” Comedians are after our bodily fluids. But why?

The essays in this month’s Digital Edition are unanimously concerned with the proximity of comedy to our graver emotions. Whether demonstrating the ameliorative quality of humor in dealing with our innermost fears, grappling with loneliness, growing up without a father, or processing grief, these examples of humor writing and criticism attend to, rather than shying away from, our common discomfort. Lightness and play are, in fact, qualities that allow us to shrug off our heaviest burdens. The lightness of comedy is very much the subject of these essays except, of course, when it comes to jokes, which they take very seriously. Please be advised: these essays are heavy on jokes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940660189

Book preview

Introduction

Comedians really want to make us cry. The best reaction they can hope to elicit is tears — laughter, sure, but it’s the tears they’re after. Like almost every other human emotion, there is an emoji depicting this phenomenon online: a round yellow face with an absurdly broad, open smile, eyebrows furrowed and eyes pressed closed, a pendulous teardrop dangling from each corner. It’s the face comedians want to see most, along with Spit-take Emoji and Peeing-my-pants-laughing Emoji. Comedians are after our bodily fluids. But why?

The essays in this month’s Digital Edition are unanimously concerned with the proximity of comedy to our graver emotions. Whether demonstrating the ameliorative quality of humor in dealing with our innermost fears (Robert Buscemi’s simulated meditation); grappling with loneliness (Adam Wilson’s analysis of Louis C.K. and the Rise of the ‘Laptop Loners’); growing up without a father (Sofiya Alexandra’s Let Us Now Tweet At Famous Men); or processing grief (M.G. Lord’s Cremains of the Day), these examples of humor writing and criticism attend to, rather than shying away from, our common discomfort. Moreover, these essays suggest that discomfort is a key element in comedy as an art form.

In order to make us laugh, humor writers first make us uncomfortable. Take for instance Antoine Wilson’s list of criteria, Notes on Hack, in which A Hack comic is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, who is offensive to us precisely for failing to offend — in other words, one who might make us chuckle, but who fails to bring tears to our eyes. The comic artists in this collection won’t fail to offend, choosing topics instead that risk offense, such as the unexpected parallels between exploitative internship programs and the Gulag in Andrew Nicholls’s humorous fiction, One Day in the Life of Intern Denisovich, or the representation of violence against women in Ted Scheinman’s brilliant analysis of Melissa McCarthy and the New Female Slapstick. In his original work of anachronistic twitterature, Scheinman imagines The Selected Tweets of James Agee, at once playing with the limitations of social media and making light of such perennial issues as poverty, alcoholism, and hashtags.

Lightness and play are, in fact, qualities that allow us to shrug off our heaviest burdens, what Italo Calvino refers to as the opacity and slow petrification of the world, and find ourselves crying laughing. The lightness of comedy is very much the subject of these essays— except, of course, when it comes to jokes, which they take very seriously. Please be advised: these essays are heavy on jokes.

Ginger Buswell

Humor Editor

You Look Tired: A Guided Meditation

By Robert Buscemi

All right, I think everyone’s a little tired, a little careworn, a little frayed. And we’re looking at the juncture between my thumb and forefinger, and we’re relaxing. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Good, good.

Notice where we carry our tension. In our jaws? In our spines? In our backpacks? Let that tension pass, like a state trooper on the highway. And in. And out. That’s nice.

You whack away the cares of the day like golf balls from a sand trap. You fry and crackle your worries like moths in a bug zapper. Your mind is a bug zapper drenched in honey. GZZZ! GZZ-GZZZZ!

Shhh, that’s all right — We’re breathing. I’m holding you. You’re safe.

And SWOOOOOOOOOOSH! We’re airborne, lifted by our noiseless battery-powered chin-strap propeller hats. Isn’t that summer air pleasurable? I’m wearing my velvet purple unitard, which arouses you, and you feel a freeing desire for my supple, knifelike body.

I’m a fatherly figure, a yogi.

Suddenly on land you feel my hand on your back, and now it steals lower, lower, and lightly cups your left buttock and comes back up. You laugh! It’s an encouraging, cheering gesture and you’re grateful for it. I make a second grab — you giggle, you think it’s playful! I’m a source, a guru. I’m nourishing you, stimulating you.

You want to touch the stamen of my healing flower. I am the earth, the sky, the wind. I am the impregnating cottonwood fluff. Go on. Touch my stamen. AH! But when you attempt to pat my handsome stamen, I deflect your clumsy efforts. You bad, bad child!

And now I’m chasing you! I tackle you and muss your hair and give you noogies quickly and roughly, then run away — you chase me, but I’m too fast for you to catch! Look at me skip away through the purple prairie! Ahhh! you think. He’s beautiful! That physique! What a fine specimen! His muscular back forms a perfect, rippling V!

And as you contemplate the Michelangelo’s David–like suppleness of my torso, suddenly all eleven-fifty of us are holding hands, floating in a circle in a