The Bad Humor Man

The other day, my nephew went with me to the store.  He never goes, so as a bribe, I told him I'd buy him something.  Strangely, he chose a huge, oversized tennis ball which would put you in the hospital if you ever hit it with a racket.  But I discovered later that he was using it to play basketball.  I saw it in the basket, and thought, "There's a joke in this somewhere."

So, I took a picture of it, and while I was mowing the lawn, I pondered on it.*

In the end, I came up with this post on Facebook:

If you can't read it, I said "Warning: This is what will happen if Hillary is elected in 2016."

Now, whether you think that's funny or not is both relative and open to debate, but my niece posted on it almost immediately, saying, "This is very Gen Z humor, I'm impressed.  10/10."  That pleased me.  But why is it funny, exactly . . . if it IS funny?

Is it the nonsensical nature of the post?  Is it the fact that I'm warning you about something that has already not happened?  Is it that it's a parody of the garbage we used to see on the Far Right, trying to stir up fear in old people already terrified of change?  Or is it that I, a city-loving Liberal with at least one (?) gay friend, would post that kind of propaganda?  Or is it just that the idea of a tennis ball in a basketball hoop is weird?

My cousin, who is Gen X like me, replied to my niece, "low key I don’t get it no cap"

I guess I was aping an image I saw online a few years ago that I thought was both hilarious and totally effed-up, where there was some kind of baffling human/monster hybrid on a jungle gym, along with the caption: Athiests, if God doesn't exist, then how do you explain this?

I tried to find it just now, but couldn't.  The best I could do was this (which is sort of the same thing):

I found a couple more, both pretty good:

There's admittedly a law of diminishing returns with this sort of thing.

Here, I'll try one myself:

Anyway, enjoying my time in the sun, I created another hopefully-funny non sequitur, and posted it on Facebook.

Appropriately twisted?  Maybe.  Funny because of it?  Well, maybe not.  Nobody else seemed to think it was funny (or appreciate that I gave the tomato and angry look).

Somebody immediately got on there to defend the Bible verse, and explain what it actually means.  And that's pretty close to the opposite of funny.

I don't know why certain things are funny, and I don't know why certain things don't work.  I remember Han Solo getting a big laugh in RETURN OF THE JEDI when he says, "I dunno, fly casual," and it's been exactly forty years and two days, and I still don't get the joke.

My pal Jeff really loves this animated Wes Anderson film called THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX, and he sat me down to watch it.  And I was in Hell, the whole time.  I have never had a more negative experience with a movie (and we're including WEST SIDE STORY), and I'd liken the way I felt throughout to how I felt the second-to-last time I got food poisoning.

I hated the movie so much, it made me wonder if Jeff and I could even be friends anymore.  And after I stabbed him in the neck with a letter opener during the end titles, he wondered the same thing.

I find the words "chunder," "C.H.U.D.," "Chima," "chalupa," "Temecula," and "chingazo" extremely funny, and use nearly all of them multiple times a day.  My guess is, you don't feel the same.

And there was that lovely Jake From State Farm commercial, where the husband is on the phone with his insurance company (although they make it look like he's talking to a prostitute (or even more likely, a Slovenian underage prostitute), and his wife, suspicious, comes downstairs and says, "Dennis, who the f**k are you talking to?" (it was a pretty progressive commercial for its time, pun intended) 

And the poor hapless henpecked husband says, "I'm on the phone with Jake from State Farm."  The wife goes, "Jake from State Farm, at three in the morning?" and takes the phone away and says into it, "What are you wearing, 'Jake From State Farm'?" with eye-rolling sarcasm.  They cut to the shlubby guy at the insurance company, and he says, "Uh, khakis."  The wife hands the phone back and says, "She sounds hideous."

Funniest commercial of the year.  Sure to win the prize for--

But then the commercial continues, and the husband says, "Well, she's a guy, so..."  And that's not only the end of the commercial, but the end of humor everywhere.  All the good will and energy created by this almost-perfect commercial is destroyed by that last line.  It's like when you were a child and you were so excited for Christmas, listing off everything you hoped you'd get, and your Uncle Ali shouted at you, "YOUR GRANDMOTHER DIED OF SYPHILLUS!"  Remember that?

Now, I don't know if you agree that that final line ruined the humor (I know that the trans community took issue with it, for some reason that was probably NOT about killing any residual comedy), but if you don't, how about this?

Okay, I was editing audio for ten minutes, and dedicated forty-one minutes to this blog post, so now I feel shame.  But while I'm at it, let me say that I watched the 2011 Jake From State Farm commercial again just now, and there is literally .2731 seconds between the wife saying "She sounds hideous" and the husband saying "Well, she's a guy so," so I suppose it is possible that it's only me.  But I don't care.  I'm right on this one.  Don't make me post another Kinison.

*My favorite of the late night talk shows is Seth Meyers, and often, his writers will come up with more than one joke that he runs for a given image, and he'll sometimes present two or three of them, occasionally even mentioning which writer came up with which one (ESPECIALLY if they bomb).  And this makes me wish I were writing bad jokes for a living.