Learning Experience 1

           At the beginning of the semester, I came into class with no knowledge of humor as an academic subject or that it was even studied as one. Within the first few weeks of the course, I found many of the theories that attempted to describe humor in its entirety informative, though far from all-inclusive. Of these theories, I found the incongruity theory to be incredibly fascinating.

            On the base level, the theory intrigued me simply because it made a lot of sense. Many of the things in life at which we laugh are funny because they are unexpected, even uncomfortable (since laughter is often a response to discomfort in a situation). For instance, we find it funny when people perform an action outside of normal behavior like the scene in Elf in which Buddy, the principle character, drinks an entire 2-liter bottle of Coke in one long chug and proceeds to burp for an extraordinarily long period of time. We find this scene comical because Buddy has broken our expectations of societal norms.

            In my everyday life, I see this all the time, or at least, with a new lens, I notice it with great frequency both in new occurrences and memories of past ones. Recently, I was in the BLUU with a friend of mine, Ajja, when he dared me to perform an interpretive dance to Adele’s ridiculously overplayed hit song, “Hello,” and so I, scooting my chair out, decided to take him up on it and began my improvisation. Much of the cafeteria began laughing, and Ajja seemed to be failing to breathe in his laughter response to my tomfoolery. This, of course, was an instance in which the two of us subconsciously realized the humor of an act that breaks the congruity of everyday normalcy (daring me to break such norms, knowing it would be comical).

            In terms of my own life, I think this has helped me to increase my level of funniness by helping me to understand one of the basic principles behind making people laugh. Our limericks provide a good example of a way in which I think I have improved my skills as a comic. When we were endeavoring to conclude our Art Briles slander poem, I decided that “International nautical mile” was the funniest conclusion because it breaks the themes of the poem in an unexpected and silly way. It may have broken the boundary of absurdity, but I think that the limerick remained funny because the structure of the poem itself was still intact.