Jan. 11, 2007

Don't Try Any Funny Stuff

By Oronte

I tried to put a panel session together for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in Atlanta this spring. The topic was going to be humor, which I thought would go over well. I got my editor at McSweeney’s to consider being on the panel; he knows funny and teaches at a university, so I just needed to find two more people who could speak amusingly and convincingly about humor, satire, the comic, lightedheartedness, whimsy, whatever, to a crowd of writer-teachers and grad students. I couldn’t find any.

The writers I contacted don’t teach and didn’t want the expense of traveling to speak at a conference; the academics who might speak about humor in literature would never go to AWP, since it’s not scholarly. Anyway, the AWP crowd wouldn’t care to hear papers read to them on, say, “Humor Appreciation as an Adaptive Esthetic Emotion” (a very interesting article from Volume 19, Issue 1, of HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research.)

I never set out to write humor, if that’s what I write (I’m sure you have comments on that). But having written for a humor magazine for a year now, I have thoughts about it. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the funniest joke I ever read—maybe the archetype for all humor—which Mark Twain stole from Abe Lincoln.

Comments

Oh! Oh! Pick Me!

Dear Sir,

Me! Me! Pick Me! I know humor. I write. I read. I teach. I’ll pay my own way to a conference. I won’t look down my nose (no matter how substantial) at the attendees. I’m perfect for this gig.

Cordially,

Christopher Milton

Christopher Milton, at 11:30 am EST on January 11, 2007

we should, by now, be able to count up the funny. and then run a statistical analyses or two (or 21, to be statistically accurate). and then count the results. and then make a spreadsheet. and then peer review it. then i’d be game.

BC, quantify, above all else, at 2:01 pm EST on January 11, 2007

Christopher: Where you been? There’s always next year.

BC: Now *you’re* funny!

Oronte, at 5:35 pm EST on January 11, 2007

Hmmm... would a geneticist be useful?

This looks interesting. Is it the sort of thing that might help me appreciate the boundaries of Arts and Science generally? Plus, thanks for the link to the Raisin Bran stuff. ~cheers

David Ng, UBC, at 3:50 pm EST on January 12, 2007

Humour

Maybe you were looking in the wrong direction, I know some very funny writers on the faculty at Goucher’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction.

Eve, Student MFA at Goucher College, at 10:31 am EST on January 17, 2007