No humour in Great Expectations? That’s gotta be sarcastic, right? Blatant example: Miss Haversham, an old lady who was jilted on her wedding day and keeps her whole mansion and clothes exactly as they were at that moment, letting everything slowly rot… I mean, it’s not three Stooges or Marx Brothers humour, it’s mid 1800s, but it’s pretty amusing. I know a lot of people who are like that (metaphorically), wanting the past to stay frozen and not admitting that tempus fugits.* Dickens’ humour is often satirical rather than ha-ha, but it’s there.
*[sub]Yes, I know, it’s a ref to The Music Man[/sub]
Excellent post, ministryman. A whole new (for me anyway) way of looking at the bible. That kind of rude macho humor I associated with, well Vikings. But it makes perfect sense that that is the kind of rough macho gory kind of humor that fighting men trade around the campfire, even when that campfire is in the Middle East and alcohol does not play as big a part in it as in Nordic stories. The Bible is about warriors, after all, especially the first parts. The emphasis on all the patriarchal parts rules and " thou shalts" kind of obscures that.
I agree. Dickens humor is often about catchphrases repeated often in incongruous circumstances. Like Pip’s older sister, who bosses both her kind husband and Pip around, yet keeps sighing that she works so hard and gets no respect and “I’m never out of my apron”. I thought it pretty funny how she keeps playing the martyr with that apron.
Or that lawyer (not sure about his name) who bites his finger. A bad habit, like nail biting, right? No. That lawyer has turned his finger biting into an art, into a mighty weapon that sways judges and intimidates suspects and clients.
'Stetson!
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'O keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!’
…
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
Not, you know, a laugh riot, but there’s humor there.
I can’t think of much humor in Greek tragedy, unless you count Orestes’ nurse grumping about how much of a pain it is to take care of a baby. Irony, yes, but most of the time it’s meant to be the “bitter twist of fate” sort of irony rather than the funny kind.
While it’s not deliberately funny, I’ve always found the book of Job really funny. It does manage to be really legitimately depressing (as well as a pretty bad “just so” story for why bad things happen to good people), but I can never get the mental image out of my head that God and Satan are just sitting up in having a betting match with Satan begging to troll the high strung pious guy (which is basically what is happening, mind you, just with prettier words) out of my head.
S: “Hey, man, that guy is REALLY into you I bet I could shatter that.”
G: “Nah, man, that guy is like REALLY pious.”
S: “Seriously, let me try, I totally could break him.”
G: “Yeah, right, do your worst.”
<later>
G: “Oh wow, I can’t believe you just did that! But see, he’s still strong.”
S: “Wow, this dude has got it BAD, let me try again.”
G: “I dunno, I think I won.”
S: C’mon!"
G: “Okay, fine. Try again”
S: “Sweet, I know this will do the trick FOR SURE.”
What?
“I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
is one of the most hilarious stanzas in poetry, it’s stuck with me since school.
That was the story of Dinah, daughter to Jacob and sister of Judah, Simeon, Levi, Naptali, Issachar, Asher, Dan, Zebeulon, Gad, Benjamin, Judah and Joseph of Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat fame.
[QUOTE=ministryman]
Seriously, the Bible does have a lot of humor…
Example 1: A man molests the sister of another man (Names are omitted because I’m too tired to dig out my Bible and I’m at work - It’s Genesis 34, look it up). The penalty is death. The molester begs and pleads to marry the woman. No dice. The offended man says the molester can have her and everybody can be friends IF he and his tribe are circumcised.
So the man and his tribe agree. A few days later, the offended man and his tribe kill every last one of the now-in-pain men.
Pretty funny, huh? Kinda like a Old Testament Pulp Fiction scene…
[/QUOTE]
From how I see it, the “joke” is that the tribe of the offended man (i.e., that of Judah, Simeon, Joseph, etc.) were always planning the massacre the other tribe no matter what. The request that they had to circumcise themselves was made only to just to dick with them (so to speak). In fact, it may have really been offered as a “go fuck yourself” type of proposal. They just didn’t expect the other tribe would be dumb enough to actually do it.
In Euripides’s Orestes I remember there’s a bit where Orestes is sleeping and Electra is watching over him. The chorus comes in and she tells them to be quiet so they don’t wake him. But the chorus, being the chorus, can’t really be quiet. They just keep saying they’re being quiet, and the whole thing turns into a kind of “Stop it!”/“I’m not touching you!” exchange that I thought was pretty funny.
