Humor Draft 2

As a continuation of the freewrites from the previous week, The S took a stab at writing a structure for a curriculum The MOST could use in approaching humor. I took a stab at combining our various humor thoughts into something coherent. It came out like this:

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In "Modern English Useage", H.W. Fowler describes humor saying that its aim is discovery and its province is human nature. Humor is tied to the everyday and at the same time, it can be a vessel for the conveyance of more serious or threatening themes and ideas. It can breach political and sometimes even frightening ideas and topics by referencing them in a light way. Laughing out loud can cause serious trouble and being too serious is funny business.

Humor is largely a side effect of process. Humor is the methane released by the cow while it digests its food. Humor requires the setting of a context and the surprising or insightful alteration of that context. Context evolves from the development of processes: patterns, narratives, or reliance on expectations.

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. For the practitioner, setting out to discover humor makes you vulnerable and requires courage. In order to explore it, parameters of emotional safety have to be set and gentleness enforced within the audience. Working collaboratively provides the best kind of audience, allowing for failure without losing face. It allows us to tell the same bad joke again and again and again until someday people actually laugh at it.

We are interested in humor in life more than humor in art. For us what seems most interesting is to find out what I, you, we care about, deeply, and then to have fun working on projects together. We have fun by taking our wildest dreams and fantastic proposals and making them as real as we can. The absurdity of this can be surreal, fun and sometimes even funny, and this is where we will begin our search.
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Freewrite on Structure:
One- Individuality. While we may not always succeed, individuality, individual expression and respect for the individual is an internal value we hold. This would then be one way we would contribute to the design of the block, the choice of visiting artists and how we would bring respect to each student within the block. Meaning, we would each be bringing our perspectives and suggestions to the whole of the design. For example, in our meeting tonight we aimed for each person bringing their perspective to the agenda items and discussion process. Student projects, either collective or individual, would be initiated based on the desire of the student. We would be partners in the unrolling or manifesting of the projects but they would be initiated by the group and/or the student.

Two- Helpful Anarchy. While as individuals or as a collective the MOST may not describe ourselves or identify with being anarchists, the cultural and collective nature of anarchist sensibility is infused into out process and projects and the design work of building a block for humor would naturally have this sensibility as well. Some of these characteristics are: freedom of expression, collective or participatory process, fun and play, and nonhierarchical relationships. I believe we would see ourselves as partners to the students in finding humor, creating humor…? These characteristics would be a natural part of the design process as well as part of the content or experience of the block (not the whole of content and experience but would be a prominent flavor)

Three- Mystical (Poetical?) research and action. This is the place where unexplained insight, Non-linear practices and absurdist or fantastical actions, moves, suggestions, readings of the linear or concrete plane. This would be the background of the possibility of non-artists or unexpected visiting artists may come into play. It also would provide a quality to possible mincro-themes or adventures within the structure of the block (ie Foggy Mondays- I’m not saying here we would have/do foggy Mondays I’m saying something about the kind of themes or possible actions that could occur based on desire and the fantastic- does someone want to research “blue” for the whole ten weeks? Does someone want to write a play every day at 3:10-3:20 and then act our the whole 10 weeks worth of plays in one day at then end?) I don’t know. Hey, maybe I want to do that.

Collective coherence- This might the aspect where we able to bring some kind of Camaraderie to the experience- this could be through morning exercise class, tools for consensus building, how to build frameworks or large (and small?) scale intentions and strategies for working toward desired outcomes. I don’t know how yet to connect this one to humor …. Just of the top of my head at the moment it seems like the CONTENT of the visiting artists would be quite directly humor oriented. Hmmm.