Nerd Humour (and why I love it)

Ever heard or seen nerd humour?

Let me give you an example…

Or how about some literary nerd humour…

How about this version?

You either get them or you don’t.

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can open it up, analyze it and figure out exactly what makes it tick…

But the frog rarely survives the process.

I think one of the things I love most about nerd humour is that there is a certain amount of elitism involved with it.

It’s the ultimate “in” joke because you know only about 6% of the population truly “gets” it.

So lighten up, get in touch with your inner nerd… and have a good snorty chuckle.

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‘Trashy Fanger Lit’

Nothing unnerves a gaggle of rednecks quite like the silvery laugh from a vampyre that just received 33 bullets in her chest. They generally find it unsettling.

A deep self-satisfied sigh… a single dark eyebrow arched high over a glowing green eye… a coquettish turn of the head.

“Now, now boys,” spoke the voice, soft as a silk coffin lining. “Is that any way to treat a lady?”

A half-dozen pair of eyes stared, transfixed, as a tiny smile played at the corners of those luscious moist soft red lips, two precious emeralds set just above.

The men were dead before their bodies hit the snow, their life forces seeping out, staining the soft white blanket beneath them.

This is an ‘off the top of my head’ example of the bargain-basement vampyre fiction I lovingly call ‘Trashy Fanger Lit!’

Right now, I am making my way through Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Slayer series of novels. And please do not think that Ms. Hamilton’s writing lives down to the dreck I scribbled above. I like her works.

I am not the fastest reader in the world, so it is taking me forever (or so it seems to me) but I enjoy these books. It is a fabulous blend of the film noir, hard-bitten wise-cracking private detective style and modern vampyre ‘out of the coffin’ motif.

If you haven’t read these books, give the first one, ‘Guilty Pleasures’, a try to see if, like me, you get hooked!

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Why Our Brains Make Us Laugh

Wandering, as I am wont to do, along the littered, soft gravel shoulders of the information superhighway, I stumbled across an interesting article last week in the online edition of The Boston Globe. The article’s title, in part, reads…

My first thought was, “Why do we need or even want to know why the brain makes us laugh?” Let’s face it. Nothing ruins a joke more than trying to explain it.

(Renaissance Jocularity)

The Boston Globe article states…

He who laughs last usually has to have the joke explained. But then why bother? After all, nothing kills humor faster than analysis… It’s just a joke: Don’t overthink it. But what if humor (or mirth, in research speak) is intimately linked to thinking? What if we’d have trouble thinking without it? That’s the argument of “Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind” (MIT Press, 2011).

As someone (supposedly Johnny Carson) once put it, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can open it up, examine it and figure out exactly how it works… but the frog rarely survives the process.” [1]

(Is this some kind of joke??)

Hard as it might be to believe by reading my present material, in my early years I took comedy quite seriously. Seriously enough, in fact, to read Sigmund Freud’s publication on the topic, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.” [2] So naturally, when I tripped over this article, I was intrigued by the idea of a study on how the mind processes humour.

The authors of “Inside Jokes” (you have to admit, it is kind of a cute title), begin from the idea that our brains try to make sense of our daily lives via a never-ending series of assumptions, based on sparse, incomplete information. All these best guesses simplify our world, give us critical insights into the minds of others, and streamline our decisions.

But mistakes are inevitable, and even a small faulty assumption can open the door to bigger and costlier mistakes. It is crucial, therefore, for the brain to constantly undertake a relentless ‘seek and destroy’ mission on as many of these self-induced errors as possible.

(aka Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

And it is at this point that humour comes in. Mirth… that little pulse of reward the brain gives itself for seeking out and correcting our mistaken assumptions. A sense of humor is the lure that keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. As “Inside Jokes” argues, much of what we consider comedy takes advantage of this cognitive reflex, much as McDonald’s taps our evolved taste for high-energy food.

The brain is a complicated machine. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Clement Dennett once described human brains as “Chevy engines running Maserati software.”

(Brainwork, like the comedy business, is not funny)

Humans think prodigiously. In every situation, the human brain needs to constantly anticipate the future by making assumptions about the world that unfold at breakneck speed. This often results in errors. Finding and disabling these errors is a critical task. But it’s a resource-hungry job that has to compete with everything else our brains are doing. It’s very hard. And taxing. And not a lot of fun, really. So what’s in it for the brain? What’s the payoff for all the effort put into finding and correcting its own mistakes.

Well, basically, the brain has to bribe itself to do this important work. And how does it bribe itself? It bribes itself… by making the discovery of its own mistakes enjoyable. It makes it ‘funny.’

The pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain’s reward for discovering its mistaken inferences!

(Brilliant!)

But if a sense of humor is part of our basic, human thinking machinery, then why can’t we agree about what’s funny?

As co-author Hurley puts it, “What’s universal about humor is the process, not the content. Everybody faces every situation with different beliefs, knowledge, and understandings about the world. And different understandings lead to different assumptions and therefore different false assumptions.”

A sense of humour is more than just a valuable asset for a thinking being. It actually helps reduce the mistakes one makes and acts upon.

(These girls are improving the way their minds work!)

Well, there you have it, boys and girls… The ability to detect humor actually improves one’s chances at getting by in this world.

Who’d have thunk it?

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[1] I’ve since discovered the quote. “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”  E.B. White.

[2] Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, published in 1905. Riveting stuff. No, really. It is. You should read it, if you are truly interested in humour and how the mind processes it.

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Banned Books

When a group of well-meaning, I’m sure, if somewhat overly zealous citizens attempts to ban [1], or heaven forbid, burn books, I almost invariably find that the objects of their righteous indignation and moral outrage constitute what I would consider a veritable ‘Required Reading List’ for any high school English course I was charged with overseeing, should I ever wind up on the curriculum committee of our local Board of Education.

Let me take you on a stroll down a list of some famous books which people or groups have attempted to remove, with varying degrees of success, from school reading lists or have pulled from their local public libraries.

Captain Underpants (series), by Dav Polk
Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
Twilight (series), by Stephanie Meyer
Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
1984, by George Orwell
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare

The concerned parents, citizens, church groups, etc, usually cite as one their reasons for demanding the ban the fact that society, especially young underage children, need to be protected from these books.

It’s bad enough when concerned albeit misguided parents and groups try to pull this stunt. How much worse is it when they convince politicians to change the law to effect the same results! Lawmakers, too, often echo the ‘protecting our children’ mantra. At the local “Stop our library exposing kids to Captain Underpants!” level, it is merely silly and overprotective. At the municipal, provincial and federal levels of government, it’s scary and dangerous.

I’m sure there are ways to protect society and children from obscene materials. Reducing the entire adult population of Canada to reading only what is fit for children is, I would suggest, not the best option. [2]

Or as Mark Twain once put it, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.”

Luckily, we have courts and judges to rein in this kind of schtick. In Canada, at any rate, judges are appointed and therefore don’t have to pander to people’s fears, prejudices, mob mentality and knee-jerk reactions to get and keep their jobs. Their positions are not dependent on the whim of the masses.

As a newbie bl*gger (as opposed to a REAL writer, as was recently pointed out to me by a near and dear 19-year-old ‘real writer’ friend of mine) [3], as a former artist and as someone who has more than a passing interest in defending constitutional rights, especially freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion, it chills me to the bone when a person or group tries to prevent others from reading things of which they disapprove. You want to keep Captain Underpants from damaging your own kids? Great! If you think the Harry Potter or Twilight series is so soul-endangering that you as an adult don’t want to read it, let alone your young teenage daughter? Mazel tov! But to try to get a library, school or government (at any level) to prevent others from seeing otherwise legal books? I don’t think so.

Keep Freedom Alive. Read Banned Books! [4]

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[1] I am not discussing attempts by the government to ban books. What I am talking about in this piece is attempts by groups and, in some cases, individual citizens to get schools and libraries to “ban” certain books. In the case of schools, they want to stop some books being taught in school and, in some cases, even prevent having the students read passages aloud from the books. In the case of libraries, they want the books removed from the shelves altogether or at least have the books available only upon request and only to adults.

[2] As United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women, in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig . . . We have before us legislation not reasonably restricted to the evil with which it is said to deal. The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. It thereby arbitrarily curtails one of those liberties of the individual, now enshrined in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, that history has attested as the indispensable conditions for the maintenance and progress of a free society.”

[3] More on this in a future blog!

[4] Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read (September 24−October 1, 2011).

For more information, check out the Banned & Challenged Books section on the American Library Association’s site.

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