Humor

I’m not particularly funny myself, but I love humor — at least, other than the teen raunch variety.  That certainly extends to broad, slapstick humor – The Producers, the 1968 original rather than the remake, is one of my all time favorite movies and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World! and Foul Play are others, not to mention the Harry Chapin song 30,000 Pounds of Bananas.  I’ve even been known to enjoy the occasional shaggy dog story that makes everyone else groan.

But my favorites in humor tend toward the clever and witty end of the spectrum.  Woody Allen movies – Bananas, particularly the scenes with Howard Cosell, and Love and Death are his best, IMO.  The occasional Neil Simon — I wish The Cheap Detective played on cable more frequently (although now it’s hard to repress the laughter when I watch Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, or To Have and Have Not).  And my favorite part of Airplane! was the scene on the beach:

Elaine : . . . what’s the matter???
Striker : My orders came through. My squadron ships out
tomorrow.  We’re bombing the storage depots at
Daiquiri [???] at 18:00 hours. We’re coming in from the
North, below their radar.
Elaine : When will you be back?
Striker : I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.

Not to mention the seaweed.  Why didn’t Burt and Deborah have to deal with that???

But what got me started thinking about this was not movies or books, but wit in songs.  You run across the occasional broad humor in songs, but true wit seems much more rare.  There are a couple, though, that always make me smile.  Alice Cooper in School’s Out:

Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes

That last line is one of the most clever expressions of the rock mentality I’ve ever heard.

And my favorite example of wit in song, from Simon & Garfunkel’s A Simple Desultory Phillipic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission):

I knew a man whose brain was small
Couldn’t think of nothing at all
Not the same as you and me
He doesn’t dig poetry
He’s so unhip, when you say “Dylan” he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas
Whoever he was
The man ain’t got no culture!
But it’s alright Ma
Everybody must get stoned

Simply lovely.  (Even before I found out recently that Bob Dylan took his stage name from Dylan Thomas.)

OK, so my sense of humor may be a little bit warped compared to yours.