Humor Freewrites

The MOST has been trying to write about our philosophy of "Humor in Art." I thought that I might post some information here about our current process is for developing a "group" philosophy.

We usually discuss first whether we are interested in doing the project. We've decided that this will be an interesting exercise, and are now working on some freewrite exercises. We each agreed at our last meeting to take 10-30 minutes writing about our philosophy on humor and how it relates to the MOST. These freewrites are not edited for clarity or coherence. They are just about getting something out on to the page fresh from the brain.

We later decide how to put them together in a coherent fashion that includes everyone's input in a meaningful way. I'll put that version up later.

Below are the freewrites of M, O and a PDF of Rudy, The T of the MOST's, drawing as freewrite. The shapes you see are little talking maps of Mostlandia.

M's Freewrite:

In H.W. Fowler's "Modern English Useage", 1926, humor is described in the following way: the aim of humor is discovery; the province is human nature; the method is by observation; and the audience is the sympathetic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes it as "that quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous".

Humor is tied to the everyday: Robert Petri trips over an ottoman, Jack Tripper falls over a couch. Humor is tied to the fantastic: a dim-witted gardener walks across the surface of a pond, pigs. In space.

Humor is a tool of communication. It can breach serious and sometimes even frightening ideas and topics by refencing them in a light way. It is a vessel for the conveyance of themes and ideas. Audiences tend to remember humorous moments longer, and these memories carry a deeper emotion resonance.

Humor is largely a side effect of process. Humor is the methane released by the cow while it digests its food. A man who can never pick up his hat because he kicks it aways as he reaches for it on the ground. Committees than can never come to final resolutions because they form committees to review the resolutions of the previous committee. Humor is learned through practice, but often the failure of the intention is what meets the goal: trying to be funny is sometimes harder than being accidentally funny.

O's Freewrite:
humor takes courage
it requires emotional safety to explore
it requires initial failures (see courage, above)
it requires a the setting of a context and the surprising/insightful alteration of that context
context comes from development of a pattern, or narrative, or reliance on expectations
We set our pattern via meetings. we created emotional safety out of trying to work together and sometimes failing and continuing past that. We found our context (place and bureaucracy) by surprise by investigating our friend's floor, and by listening to one another's interests and quirks.
We have developed a narrative that we sometimes break, and we make one another laugh by continuing to tell the story that has to be told.
working collaboratively with people you trust allows for failure without losing face
it allows you to tell the same bad joke again and again and again until someday people actually laugh at it.
and i think what we're proposing requires a certain amount of gentleness and precision at the same time. by precision i mean adherence to some sort of regular patterns, or regular activities, or continually showing up for work.
and humor isn't in high art. it's not even really jeff koons. it's more vulnerable. it kind of hides in peoples weaknesses. and some people can't laugh at their weaknesses, but those who can have found some kind of gem.

T's Freewrite: