An appeal, a bit of writing
Brr is cold. Brrr.
First and foremost, was wondering if anyone out there has any experience setting up podcasts. I've been thinking about starting up a broadcast, but seem to lack the technical knowledge. Read a bit about web feeds and web syndication - predictably, it made my head spin. If any one knows anything, even a good site to link me to, I will hug you.
I've wanted to put this up for a while...this is an introductory speech/short essay on comedy I cooked up for the last release of a campus humor 'zine I was involved with. I'm particularly interested in academic work on the whys and wherefores of humor as evolutionary advantage.
Consider a scenario. A small, whelk-like creature peers towards land. Its primitive fins stir up the water as it fantasizes about life on dry, unpopulated earth. Excited about the prospect, it seeks out whole schools of whelk-like friends, sharing an unspoken chromosomal idea. In short, the primordial stew is spurred to genetic revolution by the promise of real estate.
Skip forward several billion years. Mankind bestrides the world like a colossus, his technological marvels making the impossible possible. The internet, space travel, and the Hadron Collider all owe an impossible debt to that first whelk-like creature, whose double helix decided, in a fit of whimsy, to mutate.
Since the advent of the lung, species have differentiated with astonishing creativity. Evolution has given rise to wings, opposable thumbs, and defensive electrostatic charges. Evolution has also allowed for a new sort of thinking. This thinking is less based in instinct and the desire to mate, and more concerned with a shiny, barely-out-of-the-box concept called the future. Humankind, alone on the earth, has opened the metaphoric box, sifted through the metaphoric tide of foam peanuts, and discovered this very non-metaphoric concept. We save money to pay our inevitable taxes, and we seek knowledge in the present to better ourselves in coming years. We are aware that time passes and that things change. We are also fully aware that, some time, some day, we will die.
How do we manage the inevitability of our death? We travel, we drink, we worship, we fuck, and we laugh, long and loud, in the dark. The true curse of humankind is its desperate desire for purpose, for drive, for the belief in some higher power that lends credence and impact to our daily existence. But when faith fails, we laugh. We laugh at satire, the scathing branch of comedy that exposes the carefully concealed idiocies inherent to culture and government. We laugh at cynicism, because watching others despair with intellect hallows mind over circumstance. We laugh at absurdism, because we like to see our fear of purposelessness embodied and dressed in silly costumes. We even honor the humble dick-and-fart joke, because such visceral witticisms remind us of our own embodied nature. Sex is a dirty, sticky, undignified morass, and we compensate by lauding a certain man from Nantucket.
Laughter, then, is the buffer between our awareness of death and death. Inevitability has the peculiar tendency to thwart everything in its path; why bother, when a pine box and weather-worn gravestone are life’s only reward? Mankind’s universal answer to this inevitability is to trivialize, exacerbate, rejoice. The ability to laugh, to ‘get’ humor, to guffaw until tears stream down our faces, is an evolutionary compensation for being self-aware. Without an aesthetic appreciation for meaninglessness, we would sink into impossible despair the second we realized that, ten or twenty or a hundred years down the road, we might trip on a roller skate, tumble down twenty-seven flights of stairs, and die. As it is we are still aware of this possibility. Roller skates remain a steadfast threat to humanity, despite the revolution of the less-lethal rollerblade. But instead of living in constant fear, we chuckle.
Today you have gathered to further your evolutionary advantage. You have come to laugh at the inanities of invincible newts, pompous has-been superheroes, truth-speaking comedians and the timetable of God’s haphazard creation of the Earth. You are here to stave off the inevitable by clothing it in a new, absurd skin.
Also, all apologies if we have any creationists in the audience this evening. The Laugh Creationists insist that the first laugh was manufactured in an Australian laboratory in 1845, coinciding with the invention of the rubber band. They are wrong, but they are also hilarious.
First and foremost, was wondering if anyone out there has any experience setting up podcasts. I've been thinking about starting up a broadcast, but seem to lack the technical knowledge. Read a bit about web feeds and web syndication - predictably, it made my head spin. If any one knows anything, even a good site to link me to, I will hug you.
I've wanted to put this up for a while...this is an introductory speech/short essay on comedy I cooked up for the last release of a campus humor 'zine I was involved with. I'm particularly interested in academic work on the whys and wherefores of humor as evolutionary advantage.
Consider a scenario. A small, whelk-like creature peers towards land. Its primitive fins stir up the water as it fantasizes about life on dry, unpopulated earth. Excited about the prospect, it seeks out whole schools of whelk-like friends, sharing an unspoken chromosomal idea. In short, the primordial stew is spurred to genetic revolution by the promise of real estate.
Skip forward several billion years. Mankind bestrides the world like a colossus, his technological marvels making the impossible possible. The internet, space travel, and the Hadron Collider all owe an impossible debt to that first whelk-like creature, whose double helix decided, in a fit of whimsy, to mutate.
Since the advent of the lung, species have differentiated with astonishing creativity. Evolution has given rise to wings, opposable thumbs, and defensive electrostatic charges. Evolution has also allowed for a new sort of thinking. This thinking is less based in instinct and the desire to mate, and more concerned with a shiny, barely-out-of-the-box concept called the future. Humankind, alone on the earth, has opened the metaphoric box, sifted through the metaphoric tide of foam peanuts, and discovered this very non-metaphoric concept. We save money to pay our inevitable taxes, and we seek knowledge in the present to better ourselves in coming years. We are aware that time passes and that things change. We are also fully aware that, some time, some day, we will die.
How do we manage the inevitability of our death? We travel, we drink, we worship, we fuck, and we laugh, long and loud, in the dark. The true curse of humankind is its desperate desire for purpose, for drive, for the belief in some higher power that lends credence and impact to our daily existence. But when faith fails, we laugh. We laugh at satire, the scathing branch of comedy that exposes the carefully concealed idiocies inherent to culture and government. We laugh at cynicism, because watching others despair with intellect hallows mind over circumstance. We laugh at absurdism, because we like to see our fear of purposelessness embodied and dressed in silly costumes. We even honor the humble dick-and-fart joke, because such visceral witticisms remind us of our own embodied nature. Sex is a dirty, sticky, undignified morass, and we compensate by lauding a certain man from Nantucket.
Laughter, then, is the buffer between our awareness of death and death. Inevitability has the peculiar tendency to thwart everything in its path; why bother, when a pine box and weather-worn gravestone are life’s only reward? Mankind’s universal answer to this inevitability is to trivialize, exacerbate, rejoice. The ability to laugh, to ‘get’ humor, to guffaw until tears stream down our faces, is an evolutionary compensation for being self-aware. Without an aesthetic appreciation for meaninglessness, we would sink into impossible despair the second we realized that, ten or twenty or a hundred years down the road, we might trip on a roller skate, tumble down twenty-seven flights of stairs, and die. As it is we are still aware of this possibility. Roller skates remain a steadfast threat to humanity, despite the revolution of the less-lethal rollerblade. But instead of living in constant fear, we chuckle.
Today you have gathered to further your evolutionary advantage. You have come to laugh at the inanities of invincible newts, pompous has-been superheroes, truth-speaking comedians and the timetable of God’s haphazard creation of the Earth. You are here to stave off the inevitable by clothing it in a new, absurd skin.
Also, all apologies if we have any creationists in the audience this evening. The Laugh Creationists insist that the first laugh was manufactured in an Australian laboratory in 1845, coinciding with the invention of the rubber band. They are wrong, but they are also hilarious.