Mickey Z

Cool Observer

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Thursday, April 12, 2007

Do I amuse you? (lol)

Does Chris Rock make you laugh or do you prefer the Three Stooges? Witty puns or slapstick? Sight gags or New Yorker cartoons? Fart jokes or Lenny Bruce? We know there’s no accounting for taste, but is comedy different from culture to culture...from era to era?

Submitted for your approval is one Larry Semon ...an immensely popular silent comedian in the 1920s. “Chaplin, Lloyd and myself just couldn’t make two-reelers as packed with laughs as Larry’s.” That’s how Buster Keaton described Larry Semon...but which silent era clown—Keaton or Semon—do we remember today? Why was Semon box office magic in the 1920s but ancient history in the 21st century?

Laughter is universal. Everyone laughs (except maybe Leonard Nimoy) but when it comes to what produces laughter, well, that’s a different story. After all, Jerry Lewis is revered as a genius in France. In Italy, Roberto Benigni packs ‘em in. We Americans have yet to fully explain Andrew Dice Clay. Obviously, humor can be a matter of opinion. And comedic opinions fluctuate widely. Let’s not forget what happened when Ray Liotta told Joe Pesci he was a funny guy in Goodfellas.

Describing what comedy does to us often has a decidedly humorless tinge. A good joke can be side-splitting and might crack you up, leave you in stitches or in tears. It could double you over or have you busting a gut. “You’re killing me,” we shout to the stand-up comic who has reduced us to putty...as the involuntary, simultaneous contraction of fifteen facial muscles occurs in tandem with a rhythmic series of noises. “Laughter is a reflex,” says Arthur Koestler, “but unique in that it serves no apparent biological purpose; one might call it a luxury reflex.” One might...but one usually doesn’t.

Larry Semon had his fifteen minutes to charm those fifteen facial muscles...and during that brief shining moment, says film critic Leonard Maltin, he displayed “a fine, inventive, comic mind” and his gags were” among the most elaborate ever staged.” Perhaps the most sophisticated gag ever pulled off by the long-forgotten funnyman took place on October 8, 1928...the day Semon allegedly died. After filing for bankruptcy that May, the jug-eared jester agreed to undertake a Vaudeville tour to make money and pay some bills. That idea came to a crashing end when Semon suffered a nervous breakdown in August. Two months later, he was dead...or was he? Researchers have never unearthed a death certificate and many believe he staged the death in order to avoid financial ruin and the onset of talkies. Paul Auster wrote a novel, The Book of Illusions, about a forgotten film star thought to have died in his prime...but Semon’s truth is stranger than Auster’s fiction.

There’s gotta be something positive about a language with so many words for “laugh” (giggle, chortle, snicker, chuckle, cackle, guffaw, hoot, snigger, titter, snort, etc.) and “funny” (hilarious, humorous, uproarious, comical, droll, hysterical, amusing, witty, mirthful, etc.), and “joke” (gag, one-liner, witticism, wisecrack, pun, riposte, jest, prank, jibe, etc.). But somewhere over the years, we manage to lose a few hundred laughs every 24 hours.

Children (of all cultures and eras) laugh, on average, 400 times a day. For adults, the number is 15. So, it doesn’t matter what makes you laugh...but that you laugh. Doctors Gael Crystal and Patrick Flanagan call laughter “a form of internal jogging that exercises the body and stimulates the release of beneficial brain neurotransmitters and hormones.” (Where were they when Larry Semon needed help?) In America, every house or apartment comes with a medicine chest...but you’d have to order the whoopee cushion as an extra. I say we start a new movement to help recapture all those missing laughs. We can call it Puns Not Pills.

So, what makes you laugh?

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Farewell, Mr. Vonnegut