Belaya Katya

The headline of the article is “A point of view: That joke isn't funny any more”.

The article is taken from the bbc news. (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28881335)

The central idea of the article is to know the reason for laughing at unfunny jokes.

The author asks why people laugh at jokes which he doesn't find funny, and whether there's such
a thing as the wrong type of humour.

Nothing is funny twice. In fact, most things that are meant to be funny aren't even funny once, let
alone twice. But in that case why do people repeat anecdotes, jokes and witticisms with such
frequency? Why do we listen to and watch repeats of comedy programmes? The answer is that
humour is not produced by a formula or a recipe - guffaws cannot be arrived at by a series of
mathematical operations.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, that wit is the epitaph of an emotion. And if anyone should've been able
to speak with authority on the matter it was he, whose philosophy has at its core a theory of
perpetual recurrence - civilisation repeating itself, like a bad joke. What Nietzsche - who wasn't
exactly a laugh-a-minute - understood only too well, was that laughter is a form of closure.
When our diaphragms convulse, our shoulders shake, and tears come to our eyes, we're no longer
in any position to experience the finer feelings that have been annulled.

And what are those finer feelings? By and large, warmth, caring, love - the complex of emotions
that we gather together under the general heading of sympathy. Not all humour consists in
laughing at the spectacle of someone else's painful pratfall - but the vast majority of it does. Even
the subtlest of ironising cries out for slapstick.

The auther only raised this one to underscore the fact that humour is, by and large, situational.
"You had to be there" is something often said when an anecdote falls flat, just as "It's the way
she tells them" is the explanation for why we've succumbed yet again to a hopelessly old joke.
Timing, serendipity, the chance concatenation of otherwise irreconcilable phenomena, the shock
of the new - these are the elements that combine to produce that sublime moment of hilarious
abandonment, they cannot ever be precisely repeated, try as we might.

The proliferation of stand-up comedy venues, the tittering on television and the roaring on the
radio - all of it continues to increase in volume. For the most part the humour (if we can call it
that) constitutes obscenities, or the invocation of sexual or other bodily embarrassment. The first
time a comedian utters an obscenity we laugh out of shock, when it's repeated we laugh a little
less - and so on until we're punch(line) drunk. By the time the obscenity has been uttered for the
umpteenth time we're reacting in a Pavlovian fashion, as a laboratory dog salivates when an
electric buzzer has been substituted for a juicy steak. Our laughter has been processed by
repetition and then canned. We have become the laughter track for an unfunny world.

It was interesting for me to know some facts about humour and laughter.
 Glossary

Concatenation - a series of events, ideas, or things that are connected

Frequency - the number of times something happens within a particular period, or the fact of
something happening often or a large number or times

Guffaw - a loud laugh

Laugh-a-minute - someone or something that is very funny

Obscenity - behavior or language that is offensive, rude, or disgusting

Perpetual - continuing for ever in the same way

Pratfall - a fall in which a person lands on their bottom, especially for a humorous effect in a
play, film, etc.

Proliferate - to increase a lot and suddenly in number

Recurrence - the fact of happening again

Slapstick - a type of humorous acting in which the actors behave in a silly way, such as by
throwing things, falling over, etc.

Subtlest - not loud, bright, noticeable, or obvious in any way

Witticism - a remark that is both clever and humorous