Reconciling Violence and Humor

[Boyo Jim]

I reshelved my library a few weeks ago, and had a half-dozen or so duplicate paperbacks that I gave to my sister. Two of them really bugged her, apparently to the point that she's worried that I may be somehow disturbed.

They are what might be termed "Comic Crime" novels. Drowned Hopes by Donald Westlake, is about a large theft that the evil character plans to cover up by blowing a dam and drowning thousands of people. This is a book in his "Dortmunder" series that began with The Hot Rock, IIRC. The other, Double Whammy by Carl Hiassen, is about fraudulent bass fishing tournaments, and features an assortment of bizarre redneck and backwoods Florida characters, with some unusual deaths and injuries.

She simply cannot get any link between violence and humor. I'm not especially concerned that I'm disturbed (but I pobably wouldn't be whether I'm in fact disturbed or not), but I couldn't really explain coherently to her just why I found the violence (or even proposed violence that did not ultimately happen) in these novels so funny.

So I suppose I'm looking for a couple things here. One is a clearer rational for my own taste in literature; and I'd also like to hear from some people who think my taste is such books IS appalling, and why they feel that way. The question between my sister and I has too much family-related personal baggage to get through to the heart of the matter clearly.

[Geobabe]

My mother is the same way, she can't stand any sort of violence at all. She hated Pulp Fiction, while I think it's brilliant and it's one of my alltime favorite movies. "Aw man, I shot Marvin in the face." Horrifying yet hysterically funny. You can make violence funny by making it ridiculous, by stretching reality until it becomes absurd. Some people just can't get past the violent aspect of it, though, and will never find it funny.

Humor is so intangible, I don't think you can ever explain why some people find some things funny and others don't. It's just part of the enormous complexity of human beings.

[rocking chair]

some people can not handle carl hiassen. he is an interesting authour who it seems has no idea what an emergency room is and how beneficial it would be to use one. reading his books makes me wonder what dinner conversation is like at his house.

geobabe has the right of it, humour is intangible. my aunt who doesn't have the "family humour" gene thought that a news story about a man who blew up an airplane full of people just to kill his mother was funny...... the movie fargo was not funny to her. we just tiptoe around her a bit.

[kittenblue]

A lot of women don't understand the humor in "The Three Stooges" either.

[Khadaji]

Heinlein addresses this in Stranger in a Strange Land. He maintains that all humor is at the expense of other's pain. The main character has been raised by Martians and he is trying to learn to be human, but he just doesn't get humor. One day he is watching monkeys at the zoo and one monkey forcefully takes a peanut from a smaller monkey - who then goes and smacks around an even smaller monkey. Suddenly, he gets humor. He sums up by saying that Man is the ape that laughs because it hurts too much to cry. (Forgive me, it has been decades since I last read Stranger I may have some details wrong.) To further show his point, he runs through the punch lines of several jokes.

I agree to some extent and just do not get physical humor (most of the time.) And many many jokes are just mean-spirited. But I think too that Heinlein saw to the heart of the matter - laughter is sometimes how we cope with pain.

[käse]

I'm LMAO at your aunt rocking chair :)

Yes, humor is different for everyone, I think. Some people laugh when someone drops his pants. That's not awfully funny to me.

Like Geobabe I find "cleaning the itty bitty pieces of Marvin from the back-seat" hilarious.

Hard humor? Black humor? I don't know. I can laugh at silly stuff like Monty Python as well.

Main thing is you can laugh.

[I] What makes your sister laugh yojimboguy?

[Guinastasia]

Or maybe it's like when, right after September 11, we had that huge thread on possible Onion headlines.

For me, I think humor is a coping mechanism.

[Boyo Jim]

Originally posted by käse
...What makes your sister laugh yojimboguy?

Apparently she has some odd double standard. She read this article about guns (http://www.theonion.com/onion3822/guns_are_only_deadly.html) in The Onion and thought it was hysterical, particularly the quote, "Somebody should be suing those shoddy import jobs: You'd be lucky to kill a baby with one of them."

How the the Onion article can be such a hoot, and Hiassen and Westlake be so un-funny, I don't get. She also loves Ah-nold's True Lies. Other than these examples, she's kind on in the Seinfeld/Dave Barry camp of finding humor in mundane daily situations or quirky personal habits.