[/media-credit]
- What’s the Deal with Observational Comics anyway?
When the Reverb cosmos asks a question like, “What made you laugh this year?“you have to think they mean beyond the genius humor of The Oatmeal or Cracked. I mean, there are plenty of truly hilarious things out there, like XKCD, or you know, old people. There have even been a couple of television programsthat can get a pretty good laugh out of me these days. No matter how many comical goldmines I link to though, I won’t be following the true spirit of Reverb unless I am sharing an anecdote or two about my own personal life and the laughs that pop up here or there along the way.
Here’s the thing, though, life is very seldom inherently funny. It’s usually pretty sad and messy. Humor is how we help protect each other and ourselves from that horrible fact. There just aren’t the great moments of laughter unless we force them at gunpoint.
So, I force them at gunpoint, or rather crowbar point.
I have a very dark and sarcastic sense of humor. I like to laugh at things that other people think are sick and sadistic. It probably contributes to the standing belief that I am a bubbling serial killer just waiting to rise to the surface and strike out at the world around me. But, that’s crazy talk, I’d never go on a killing spree. It lacks any form of subtlety.
I can be silly, too, though. It wasn’t something that came to me naturally, it was more developed and learned. I like silly humor. I just had to devote myself to learning it’s extremely nuanced manners. It isn’t enough to just say whacky things. There is an art to it. Sometimes, it still eludes me. I let down the spirit of Monty Python.
I’ve been looking back over the last year, you know, mentally, and thinking about the times when I laughed so hard that I thought I was going to die. There are a few, but the best, funniest bits of humor are all inside jokes about things like dragons or people’s names. These are just things that probably wouldn’t be funny to anyone else, like our podcast.
I think that if you try, though, you can pretty much laugh at anything. I’ve even come to realize that the funniest people are usually the people that have the most horrifying and depressing things to draw from. Thanks, Sarah Silverman, for being the urine-soaked-silver-lining on my depression cloud. Seriously, though, she’s hilarious, and after reading her book I realized that complaining about my life makes me a whiny bitch.
Still, when they say that laughter is the best medicine, they are referring to one particular disease, and it’s one that I suffer from: depression. Thankfully, though, I do get regular doses of the cure. This has been a year filled with good friends that will always crackwise to keep me trudging along.
Also, there is pinot…
…and doodles.
…Also, Safety Dance.