Topic 10: Funny

It is easy to reach people by making them laugh or ... smile. The making is what interests me, humor is about power. Who makes fun, who is being made a fool and who is laughing. It may sound as something sweet and light but humor is a weapon.People don't think why something is funny. Humor could be very refreshing, offensive or manipulative. And the one who laughs is taking the manipulation without any resistance.

Quotes

1) Married or widowed, and he appears to be both, Borat loves women, including his sister, the “No. 4 prostitute” in Kazakhstan, with whom he shares lusty face time in the film’s opener. He’s a misogynist (a woman’s place is in the cage), which tends to go unnoticed because he’s also casually anti-Semitic.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/movies/03bora.html

2) The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.

Lean Baptiste Moliere from a letter responding to criticism of Tartuffe.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/388302/Moliere

Book: Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, first published 1859.

excerpt from In de Gloria, Belgian TV series by Jan Eelen, 2000-2002.

The satirical TV series targeted TV itself, its values and absurdities.