Join The Dark Side...and Get a Free Cookie!

A long time ago 

in a galaxy

far, far away...

A Rabbi, a Priest, and a Stormtrooper walked into a bar.

The Stormtrooper ducked! 

 

"Hey, point that thing someplace else" 

 "Get in (the game) you big furry oaf!" 

"I never knew I had it in me"

"Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. 

I've seen a lot of strange stuff, 

but I've never seen anything to make me believe 

there's any other beer better than this one!"  

 "Put that thing away before you get us all killed."

 "I assure you, Lord Vader, my men are working as fast as they can"

 

 "Luke, I am your father..."

Luke, I told you I'd be back...

That's the Terminator, you idiot...

The Wizard of Oz-sum, Part I

Ding dong....the witch is WHAT?

 Brought to you in...

Where Dorothy clicked her heels
and carried away with a blow gun

She was such a great actress 
that she brought the house down

The Wizard of Ooze spilled goodness in Munchkin Land 

and Dorothy slipped on the yellow slick road

 Fortunately, the Lollipop Guild was there to help her up 
and guide her down the Yellow Lick Road

The Munchkins were also well-versed 
In Yellow Brick Code



And gave her a grand house-warning

to cordially GET OUT of Munchkin Land and leave for Emerald City
To the land of the Oztronauts

So, Dorothy and her little dog, Totortilla

headed toward the Cowardly Line,

Toto chasing the Emerald Kitty

In search of the first residents of Oz

The Oztecs

Who could send her home

...to be continued

Whose Joke Is It, Anyway?

Contemporary humor-writing methods are an extension of past techniques. Most of the "jokes" websites I've visited are repetitive variations of one another. Even authors are repeating jokes that are so well-known, they've become cliché. 

What do you get when you play country music backward?

You get your girl back, your truck back, and maybe even your dog back. 

The country music joke is so old it's essentially rhetorical. 

The first "joke" book I ever read was Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. Thomas Cathcart & Daniel Klien had me rolling in laughter, literally, and my one true love, Philosophy, instantly transformed itself in my mind into endless one-liners.

If you see a heat wave, should you wave back? 

Unfortunately, to my utter dismay, I discovered that Cathcart & Klein repeated some of the jokes they included in Plato & a Platapus in their sequel, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates. I felt ripped-off! 

Hearing the same jokes again and again is like resting in peace with a tombstone inscription that is basically a rip-off of a joke someone else wrote. 

Apparently, in exploring life, death, the afterlife, and everything in between, Cathcart & Klein forgot to read their first book. They failed to recognize the need for new joke material. Evan Scott Smith, in his book, Writing Television Sitcoms, said that "once the surprise of the joke is lost, it just doesn't seem as funny."  My disappointment in reading the same jokes tarnished the brilliance of what I felt after having read Plato & a Platapus the first time, but it didn't tarnish my appetite for funny. In fact, that "high" I experienced in letting go of pretenses and laughing was like a drug, and I wanted more! 

Wanting more IS human nature. 

As with any contribution to a subject, new material is necessary to further the craft. If jokes written over a thousand years ago in Ancient Rome are still getting laughs, what does that tell us about human nature? Does human nature have to evolve for new joke material to evolve? 

Stop! Don't answer that last question. It was rhetorical. 

The unfortunate byproduct of extensive rewriting to make jokes appear fresh is that sometimes new material is just that, new - not necessarily better. The conflict in writing humorously is that you need to write new material without it sounding like a revision for the sake of revising. 

Marie Antoinette's famous line, "Let them eat cake," (actually, this is a misquote), Joseph Addison's, "He who hesitates is lost," Will Rogers's, "I never met a man I didn't like," and Franklin D. Roosevelt's, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," were all previously written by someone else. 

While humor-writing is certainly an art, the science behind it might reveal how to circumnavigate this age-old dilemma.

The Use of Amphiboly in Jokes

A newly married man asks his wife, 

"Would you have married me if my father hadn't left me a fortune?" 

"Honey," his wife replied, 

"I'd have married you no matter who left you that fortune." 

. . . 

A doctor said to his patient, 

"I can't find the cause of your illness," 

then paused thoughtfully and added, 

"but frankly I think it's due to drinking." 

"That's OK," replied the patient, 

"I'll come back when you're sober." 

Amphibology is a phrase or a sentence that is grammatically ambiguous. This intentional use of humorous misunderstandings and confusions is one of the elements that make jokes FUNNY! 

Many amphibological jokes start out with an irrelevant clause, i.e., "Alcohol is fine," followed immediately by irrelevant facts that distract from the first statement, i.e., "as long as you don't apply it internally." 

The conflicting failure in logic, an unsound argument, or a misleading contradiction of a strand of thought, is what the logical mind detects, which in turn is recognized as humorous, thus evoking enjoyment or laughter.  

The amphiboly is usually quite recognizable, as it is in the two examples above. If the husband in the first joke voices his concern about his wife marrying him for his money, he's probably right! 

Get it? 

My Pajamas

I grew up watching reruns of the television show, Bewitched. 

Elizabeth Montgomery was the ultimate female icon from that generation. She played the role of a beautiful, kind-hearted, powerful witch married to a dim-witted, easily-replaceable mortal named Darrin. 

Darrin disapproved of her using magic, keeping her "trapped" into the stereotypical role of the "housewife" and "mother" doting on her husband's every need - making him drinks and dinner, and sympathizing with his plight of being a junior advertising man on the supposed 'fast-track' to senior partner in a firm with a boss named Larry Tate who threatened to fire him in nearly every episode. While Darrin supposedly loved his wife, who adored him and agreed to "give up her magic" for him, he usually treated her like nothing other than a beautiful support system to his ego.

Justly, the world laughed whenever Darrin became the victim of magical spells, usually cast by Samantha, Aunt Clara, Esmeralda, Doctor Bombay, Cousin Serena (played by Elizabeth), or the wicked spells of his mother-in-law, the marvelous Endora. It didn't matter who cast the spell or why the spell was cast, or even if it was some exotic infection that only "witches got," disaster followed and the implied comedic message was that Darrin always had it whatever happened coming him!

Paul Lynde played Uncle Arthur, the constant jokester on the show. His antics often times evoked the wrath of the Witches' Council, which resulted in brilliantly funny chaos. Lynde's ability to illustrate flawed reasoning was pure comic genius.


Jokes illustrate flawed reasoning, otherwise known as "fallacies." In John and Donald Capps book, You've Got To Be Kidding: How Jokes Can Help You Think, the book describes fallacies as something that "provide us with the conceptual tools that help us think critically about the reasons we give for a particular belief." 

In the remake of Bewitched with Will Farrel and Nicole Kidman, Will Farrel, while watching reruns of Bewitched, cracks up over Uncle Arthur's classic line, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know."  

In my studies on humor, I discovered that this grammatically ambiguous phrase, otherwise known as an amphiboly (amphibology), didn't have its origins in Bewitched. It was a line from the Marx Brothers' 1930s film, Animal Crackers. In the below clip, Groucho delivers this truly classic line. 

In the field of comedy today, there's hilariously funny material being created.  Finding the continuity between what tickles the imagination of today's audience and its origins is crucial to a foundational understanding of humor studies. The ability to take something old and breathe new life into it keeps the brilliance of earlier comedy alive for new generations to come. 

The FEEL GOOD Psychology Network

Welcome to 

The FEEL GOOD Psychology Network

Life gotcha down? 

Dread going to work? 

Not sure if you even remember how to dream of a better future? 

Don't worry...

We're here to help!

The FEEL GOOD Psychology Network

We care about YOU! 

At The FEEL GOOD Psychology Network, we tackle some of the most common causes of unhappiness, and we show you what you're doing wrong so you can be like us... HAPPY! 

Here at The FEEL GOOD Psychology Network we KNOW that you are suffering and that you'll pay just about any amount of money to have someone end that misery. 

We're READY to take your MONEY and give you the life YOU always IMAGINED you could have! 

ILLUSIONS are our specialty! 

Just take a look through the testimonials of our SATISFIED CUSTOMERS...

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Bored Stiff, Nebraska resident

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"Those who can dry our tears, and force reluctant smiles to trembling lips, are more precious to us, if the truth be told, than all the statesmen and the generals of brainy people, even the great artists. For they ease the agony of life a little, and make us even imagine the possibility of being happy."  

Paul Johnson, Humorists, xxvii

Die Laughing

When I said I wanted to die "Laughing" 

I didn't mean from Kuru...

11 November 1957; Vol. LXX No. 20

Kuru is an incurable degenerative disease of the central nervous system, caused by an infectious misfolded protein called prion, resulting in a lethal laughing sickness (violent pathological bursts of laughter). 

Kuru was first noted in the Fore tribe of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. It's now believed that this disease was transmitted via cannibalism. I can't help but wonder what other associated pathologies might be present in the properties of uncontrollable laughter. 

Fortunately, my laughter is under my conscious control...or is it?