meta-humor

Blog post "spoiler" alert! If you're going to read this, make sure you've read this first along with the comments.

+5 for Ky. Via the comments, Ky cleared up the fog I had created during my most recent post. That moves Ky into 5th place in my commenter rankings, but she hasn't been around for that long! Look out! I will never reveal the super-secret spreadsheet where I keep score. Anyway, I was going to comment in the comments, but then I thought I could pad it a little with tildes and printing control characters and make an entire post of it, so here goes. ~~~~™~~ÒÛ~~~~

The general confusion is understandable. I'll admit it's not the clearest of my work. It's sometimes tough to write for people whom you don't know personally, but you assume have senses of humor similar to yours. It is also demonstrative of a larger theory I have about humor. I've always thought that in comedy the "baser" the material, the more people you have the potential to appeal to. I've done a few open mic nights in my day. Rarely did the sets of my fellow performers extend beyond pot and sex jokes. Pot and sex are the two stock comedic topics that pretty much anyone can get a laugh out of. I mean, we've all laughed at pot and sex jokes and essentially all pot and sex jokes are the same; it's tough to fuck it up. I avoid these topics because I like the challenge of trying to make my Netflix account seem funny. It's not like I don't write about these things because of a lack of experience. I've bedded 33,000 women and I smoke 6 to 8 pounds of pot a week. But I like to leave the low-lying fruit on the tree. While the appreciation of such material may be widespread, there's no sense for the joke's recipient of being "in the know," of having that bit of cleverness that makes a joke really funny and sometimes memorable.

Sure anybody can get a huge belly laugh out of bathroom humor, but I go for the subtle, "golf laugh" if you will. Maybe no audible noise is made, instead a short snort and a nod of the head in approval. Is that a smile I see on the corners of your lips? That's sophisticated joke telling my friends (surely never confused with unfunny joke telling).

Yesterday I'm writing my post and I think to use the phrase "college try." And then I think, "Why don't I personalize it and make it Roger's college try?" I then write a short paragraph encapsulating my collegiate experience. Now I think, "Ok. Nobody's going to get this." So I add the bit about "I can't do that at this very minute . . . " and I still think, "Yah, no help there. Still gonna come up empty." Then I think I could add, "At least that's how I tried things in college." But, to be true to how I tried things in college would require me to put absolutely no effort into the thing I was trying; hence, no follow-up of any kind.
I posted fully knowing it was bound to perplex. Inside jokes don't imply inside "your own head." But then I thought if anybody does get it, they'll probably think it's really funny. I take that and combine it with everybody else thinking it's not funny at all and I end up with the exact same average "humor generated" of all of my posts - marginally clever! And that is what this blog is all about.

That is all. I promise not to explain any more of my jokes, no matter how crappy.