When Weird Works
April 23rd, 2008I’m feeling odd today. Not ill or unsettled or strange… I’m just in an odd mood. Perhaps I should be clearer: I’m in the mood for oddness. I’m sure I’m not alone. One of the most loved and respected types of comedy is oddness. How else can you explain Andy Kaufman, Tim and Eric, or Garfield Minus Garfield?
Those three links are bizarre and hilarious. I just wonder what exactly makes them so funny. It isn’t just the oddness — plenty of things are odd that aren’t funny (freak shows, Robin Williams, clowns, anything expressly “zany”…). The oddness helps, but it also fufills the necessary mechanics of any joke: something familiar twisted or re-explained in an unexpected fashion. What makes them so odd, though, is that they are being twisted so greatly and so differently that only a uniquely brilliant mind can come up with it.
What’s strange to me is how easy it seems. A good deal of bizarre humor is completely arbitrary, clearly conceived with little actual thought. Something like Cactus Chef Playing “We Didn’t Start the Fire” on the Flute has no reason to be funny. It makes no sense, contains no intellectual value, and is completely inanimate. It’s a plastic fucking cactus with a chef’s hat and a flute. But when Conan sends the camera its way, it makes me chuckle every time. It could be Cactus Chef, a hippie fire hydrant riding a bacon skateboard, a raccoon with a jetpack, or even Fidel Castro Rabbit DJ. Some are funnier than others (something else I’ll never quite understand), but they all do the trick.
This isn’t exactly a revolutionary thesis, but it really does come down to the fact that humor depends on surprise. After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
(Yeah, this was a short one. I promise to be more thoughtful and absurd in the coming days.)
-Darrell