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| Laugh... but not ironically. Damn you Hipster scum. |
Don't look at me like that. That's totally how you sound.
Truth be told, being funny is not something that just happens. It requires hard work to develop something funny, to learn how to time what you say or write, and how to apply your own voice to what you're saying.
Just like any other skill, you have to practice at it.
Do you honestly think that whenever Patton Oswalt steps up to the mike and rocks your world for 90 solid minutes that he is just making shit up on the fly? No. Your brand new abdominal muscle cramps are the result of months of hard work.
What you didn't see before his latest special was Patton spending an untold amount of time writing jokes to take on the road. Nor did you see him grinding away in the clubs adjusting the timing and wording of his jokes. You don't just grab a camera and do this, is what I'm trying to get across here.
Any old asshole can tell a joke they found on the internet. Will they have told it right? Chances are really fucking good they didn't even do that. Comedy requires this little thing called timing. And timing is something that the average person just doesn't have without spending time learning what it is and how to leverage it to make a better joke.
More than anything else though, true comedy is perspective. The perspective of another person making you look at things in a whole new light. It's my job as a teller of jokes to get you look at something through the lens of my experience and balance it against what I presume to be your own set of experiences. If I presume incorrectly, then whatever joke I told will fall flat or even cause serious offense.
But slightly offending the audience can be a good thing in the right hands. It can shake up their perspective just a little and let some of mine slip in and maybe even elicit a chuckle or two. That's part of what made George Carlin such an amazing comic. He made a career of shaking a person's worldview around.
So what does this have to do with anything? I just wanted to write a little essay about why I hate hipsters so fucking much. Just because something is un-funny doesn't automatically make it funny. That's not how irony works you smarmy little c**ts.
Let's go ahead and call this little movement Anti-humor. Because that's what it is. It is the opposite of humor. Contrast it to my three earlier points. It neither requires any effort to make, nor does it require any proper delivery. It also doesn't provide a new perspective on any situations. It is merely someone saying or doing something outrageous. Usually for an excessive period of time.
Absurdity could be used as a means of humor, like the brilliant Monty Python. But they used this as a means of satire. They were satirizing the notion of the “proper Briton” by acting like fools.
But the purveyors of the anti-humor movement are skipping the satire.
What you didn't see before his latest special was Patton spending an untold amount of time writing jokes to take on the road. Nor did you see him grinding away in the clubs adjusting the timing and wording of his jokes. You don't just grab a camera and do this, is what I'm trying to get across here.
Any old asshole can tell a joke they found on the internet. Will they have told it right? Chances are really fucking good they didn't even do that. Comedy requires this little thing called timing. And timing is something that the average person just doesn't have without spending time learning what it is and how to leverage it to make a better joke.
More than anything else though, true comedy is perspective. The perspective of another person making you look at things in a whole new light. It's my job as a teller of jokes to get you look at something through the lens of my experience and balance it against what I presume to be your own set of experiences. If I presume incorrectly, then whatever joke I told will fall flat or even cause serious offense.
But slightly offending the audience can be a good thing in the right hands. It can shake up their perspective just a little and let some of mine slip in and maybe even elicit a chuckle or two. That's part of what made George Carlin such an amazing comic. He made a career of shaking a person's worldview around.
So what does this have to do with anything? I just wanted to write a little essay about why I hate hipsters so fucking much. Just because something is un-funny doesn't automatically make it funny. That's not how irony works you smarmy little c**ts.
Let's go ahead and call this little movement Anti-humor. Because that's what it is. It is the opposite of humor. Contrast it to my three earlier points. It neither requires any effort to make, nor does it require any proper delivery. It also doesn't provide a new perspective on any situations. It is merely someone saying or doing something outrageous. Usually for an excessive period of time.
Absurdity could be used as a means of humor, like the brilliant Monty Python. But they used this as a means of satire. They were satirizing the notion of the “proper Briton” by acting like fools.
But the purveyors of the anti-humor movement are skipping the satire.
That's the problem.
They don't have a point.
And that's a tremendous shame.
And that's a tremendous shame.
Jason Zebrowski is just a guy pretending to be a writer instead of being the janitor he was trained to be at his last job. His favorite activities are being sarcastic and never updating his own blog: http://theoriginalxenotaru.blogspot.com/
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