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.”

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.

Conversation Partner Meeting 2

            I met with Jacky a couple days after our first meeting following our Senior Showcase in the TCU School of Classical and Contemporary Dance Department. I found out in our first meeting that Jacky roomed with Will, one of the freshman ballet majors, so we decided to meet after he watched his roommate perform in the show. After briefly discussing the dances (I will refrain from going into too much detail here for sake of avoiding jargon and lengthy explanations of topics that don’t hold much importance here), we began to reflect upon sports and childhood pastimes.

            The conversation started as Jacky noted that when he found out Will was a ballet major, his response was that he didn’t know that men performed ballet at all, which I, as a ballet major myself, found mildly humorous in that it benignly violated the entirety of my life—I suppose I laugh self-deprecatingly at myself here. Regardless of the humor analysis, this small point spurred a conversation on sports in which we held interest.

            Jacky started by telling me of his newfound interest in basketball since being in the United States. I suppose his interest was not necessarily newly founded, but he gravitated toward the sport more heavily than when he resided in China. As the two of us continued to converse, we came upon the topic of soccer—a sport I actually comprehend in its entirety (not too complex really: kick a ball around, try to score, fall over in excruciating agony and then get up as soon as a penalty is drawn—in actuality, not that different from basketball). Apparently, soccer is huge in China. I may have expected this due to the popularity of the sport in essentially every country aside from the one in which I live, but I think that due to the lack of results put up by the Chinese national team, I just assumed it wasn’t that big in that country.

            However, Jacky informed me that the sport is popular in the country, but the people of China generally watch English Premier League teams and other European club football on their televisions. Why? The number of pitches in the country remain few and far between, especially at high schools. The conversation did not delve into why such a lack of playing fields exists in China (even in comparison to the U.S., where the sport is only beginning to gain popularity thanks to FIFA video games), but I have a theory. In the United States of ‘Merica, football fields take residence alongside nearly every high school that can afford to have one (which is most since having sports is much more important than paying teachers well in order to foster better education), and the dimensions of a football field and a soccer field are quite similar. Thus, having a soccer pitch here is fairly simple.

            In China, I assume that American football isn’t really a thing (since it isn’t popular in any other country aside from the U.S.; Canada has a few teams, but it’s not nearly as pervasive in the culture) and, therefore, that making football fields is likewise not a highly valued task. While this knowledge does not in and of itself explain the lack of soccer fields in China, it does perhaps shed some light on cultural values that might be different between the two countries. I would have to do more research to say this with certainty, but it seems to me that the education system of China concerns itself more with academia than the extracurricular activities that seem to be stressed more in the American schooling system (so much so that it is not good enough to have a 4.0 GPA and a 36 ACT score to get into Harvard or Yale: you need to have some sort of sport or provide some sort of diversity much of the time in order to be accepted to those types of schools). I will iterate here that this is mere conjecture to explain why a popular sport in China does not have enough space to be played regularly by its inhabitants and is not, in fact, fact.

Conversation Partner Meeting 1

            In my first meeting with Zhaolong (who told me he went by “Jacky”), we simply met in Union Grounds for sake of convenience and to simply get to know one another a little bit. However, before we met, I noticed a few things about his English that influenced the ways in which I communicated with him in conversation both consciously and subconsciously. First, I knew through his email diction that his vocabulary was fairly strong (he used words like “convenience” and “communicate”), but I also noticed that he struggled with grammatical structures as he used the noun form of a word as an adjective and made other minor errors (such as“grate” for “grateful”). Thus, I came in with the knowledge that I was speaking with someone who was intelligent but also with the assumption that I needed to be clear in my speech.

            The beginning of our conversation was quite formal. Jacky, reading the context of a random person emailing him several times to try to meet him, knew that I had a reason for meeting with him aside from simply wanting to get to know him. Thus, he opened by asking me, “So, you have an interest in Chinese culture?” While a start that counteracted the type of relationship I wanted to have with him, I allowed myself to seize the opportunity to ask specifically about Chinese humor—letting him know that I was particularly interested in him as a person as well. He responded by saying that the most popular form of humor in the region of China from which he hails (Southern China where both Mandarin and Cantonese are spoken) contains a lot of political satire. Due to the preconceived notions of Chinese government I had from my United States background, I found this piece of information fascinating. Believing that the Chinese government held onto many of the Communist ideas and structures of its past, I had assumed that making jabs at the government would be met with heavy punitive measures and, thus, be avoided. When Jacky revealed this form of humor to me, it opened my mind to the notion that perhaps China is further removed from its stricter regimes of the past than I previously thought, but I did not have the courage to inquire further on this subject so as not to insult Jacky with the stereotypes I intended to rid myself of.

            On another note, the revelation that political satire held popularity in China gave the two of us great common ground since such humor imbeds itself within the American culture as well, perhaps as one of the most popular forms of comedy in the country. So I asked if he had seen Saturday Night Live and if similar shows existed in China. He informed me that he had not seen the show but that shows of the sort held popularity in China; he mentioned one in particular, but its name I cannot recall. Jacky also mentioned that the largest source of jokes in China is internet memes. Once again, I found that our two cultures were on much closer fields of thought and interests than I had previously thought.

            While the conversation went on to cover a much greater array of topics, I found this to be the most relevant portion and a part that opened my mind to see Chinese culture in a much different light. I had always thought of Chinese culture as reserved in many different aspects (perhaps closer to the culture of Japan with which I have had more contact). I was surprised to learn that our cultures were much closer in thought process and, especially, in humor than I had previously thought.

What is Literature and Civilization

Interview 1

Interview 2

Interview 3

Interview 4