Uncontrollable Laughter 1:

            In my Gyrokinesis class, there is a girl, whose name shall remain unmentioned, that has a mild case of what are known as “bucked teeth.” By mild, I mean that she may or may not be able to cover them when she’s not eating or swallowing, so I get the opportunity to see them throughout the entirety of the class. In Gyrokinesis, there is a lot of snake-like articulation of the spine in which the head is in front of the body with the spine in hyperextension, and since I’m generally on the opposite side of the room as this girl (we sit in a circle), I get to see her teeth quite often.

            After long days in the department, I often come back to my dorm and complain to my girlfriend (also a dance major) about the happenings of my day, and on one particular day, this girl had frustrated me, and so naturally everything about her was offensive to me, including the continual sight of her teeth. I noted the ghastly sight of them to my girlfriend who watched for them the next time we had Gyro. After the day ended, she told me “I couldn’t stop looking at them, and all I could think of was, ‘Nemo’s swimming out to the sea!’” in an allusion to the fish with large teeth in Disney’s Finding Nemo. I began to laugh and found myself unable to stop for quite some time because the parallel was intensely funny for reasons I will explain below.

            To start, the comment entertained me because the exaggeration of her features from what I would describe as only slightly protruding front teeth to the obnoxiously oversized teeth of the fish whose teeth comprise a third of its face. The tool of exaggeration being one of the most frequently used tools, this point seems fairly obvious and not out-of-the-ordinary.

            However, through the lens of the superiority theory, my fit of laughter makes even more sense. Because I myself do not suffer from bucked teeth, it is comical to mock another for having abnormal features. Since I tend to find the sort of jokes that align with the superiority theory of humor funnier than perhaps most others, my outburst at a joke that aligns with this sense of humor makes a lot of sense, especially since the joke had to do with something that had happened in my immediate life (rather than on a television show or some other media outlet). I include the last part since we have talked about humor as often being malicious.

            Lastly, the joke satisfies the theory of benign violation in the sense that it violates the principles I generally hold on how to treat people, but since neither of us was affected by the joke, it remains “benign” and ends up harming no one. The analogy also caught me off guard because my girlfriend usually does not make jokes as harsh as that, providing yet another instance of benign violation of my expectations, this one perhaps a bit more “benign.”