more on humour
Hillman, Lee
lee_hillman at urmc.rochester.edu
Fri Feb 1 18:49:12 UTC 2002
No: HPFGUIDX 34469
Heh, someone liked my humour post.
I also have to acknowledge the two I left out, helpfully provided by Zorb
(?): Dark Humour and Parody (though Parody can also be included in farce,
sometimes. But it's different enough to warrant its own category. Thanks!).
And Amy said:
> Cultural note: "Yo' Mamma" is the shorthand for "the dozens," an
> African-American form of one-upmanship wordplay that can be very witty
> indeed. Schoolkids might not get past uncreative insults, but insults
> beginning with "Oh yeah? Well, YOUR Mamma is so fat . . . " and ending
with
> something wildly improbable and humorous have a long and deservedly
honored
> tradition. JM2K.
Ah, yes, this is exactly what I was thinking of. This type of 1-up and a
wittier type of 1-up are still both 1-up, but Yo'Mamma, because it generally
draws as its humour descriptions of either disgusting, immoral, or both
behaviour, is "lower" because it's capitalizing on physical humour.
Witticism directed at someone else's ability/capability is still 1-up, but
it's more witty, therefore it's "high" comedy. Get it? Got it? Good.
Amy continued:
> I'm not sure where the character-based humor I was referring to above fits
> onto this list. E.g., one of my favorite lines is "'Someone attacking
you,
> Harry?' Seamus asked sleepily."
<snip> and:
> And I'd love to know where you'd categorize the sorts of
> verbal humor in which JKR is very adept; they usually get classified as
some
> kind of irony, e.g. "Just then, Neville caused a slight diversion by
turning
> into a large canary" (that's physical humor, but it's the "slight
> diversion" phrasing that makes me LOL) and "Professor Trelawney kept
predicting
> Harry's death, which he found extremely annoying."
Et voila, Amy has discovered yet another form of high comedy I forgot to
mention: Irony. Irony is a big one. Ooh, I use it all the time--how could I
forget Irony? It's almost...ironic.
I think Seamus's comment I would classify as irony. Well, maybe I wouldn't.
Hm. The "slight diversion" thing is the art of understatement, which is a
subset of irony, to be sure.
I guess, in the sense that both exaggeration and understatement are ironic
forms of humour, Seamus does fit. He's forming a conclusion based on
experience, but blowing it out of proportion. Yeah, I'd say that's irony.
Yes, JKR does irony often and well. (Side note: if written, it's irony. If
spoken, it's sarcasm. So Ron's little comments are "sarcastic" if we are
talking about his delivery, but "ironic" if we are discussing JKR's literary
convention with the character.)
Gwen (who enjoyed dissecting the frogs in class--in fact, whose group had to
agree to take turns with the scalpel so everyone would get a chance....Poor
Bernard--oops, Bernice, we discovered. Ah, heck, she didn't care--she was
dead.)
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