Complex Numbers

Another Saturday Night

...and I ain't got no ideas for next week's Comedy newsletter, so I'm using this entry to bounce ideas off an audience - you know, kind of like that old video game Pong where you had to bounce a little digital "ball" off a couple of paddles on the other side of the screen? You two are the couple of paddles.

I suppose I could do something holiday-related - but, as I've mentioned before, I don't find the holidays all that amusing. More like irritating. If I could find a way to alchemically transmute "irritating" to "funny," things might be different.

We watched A Christmas Story last night - we actually own a copy, since it's one of Kirstin's holiday tradition movies, and it's one of the few holiday-themed movies that I actually like. I like it because while it's nostalgic and family-oriented, it also has an edge. There are little things that I find ceaselessly amusing, like when the camera cuts straight from the younger brother about to use the bathroom to something resembling cabbage stew boiling on a stove, or the kid who gets his tongue stuck on a cold metal lamppost.

Well, I suppose it would kinda be my job as a sometime comedy writer to perform the abovementioned transmutation of irritating to funny. That's what we do, right? We take something sacred, or profane, or irritating, or annoying, or completely mundane, and turn it around so people find a way to laugh at it.

Thing is, I didn't start out to be funny - I started out to write science fiction.

A common trick in science fiction, one which goes all the way back to its roots in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is to write in the Alien Observer.

The Alien Observer probably has some literary name, it's so common. The basic idea is that you have a society like our own that is visited by a stranger. The stranger is rarely the main character in the story; more often, he, she or it (it could be a computer or literal space alien) serves as a conscience or foil for the protagonist. A prime example is Heinlein's Man from Mars in Stranger in a Strange Land, but I could come up with dozens of examples if I weren't basically lazy. The A.O.'s purpose in the story, besides to help move the plot along, is to point out absurdities inherent in the reader's own society, culture or modes of behavior. (There's also the reverse, where the main character is a human in an alien world so the alien world can be conveyed through the eyes of someone familiar.)

What this has in common with humor writing is that a lot of humor is all about pointing out the absurdities in society, or in human behavior. The humorist has to be the Alien Observer, finding things that the rest of us take too seriously, or for granted. This is, in fact, a sacred duty; the court jester has long enjoyed protected status - in exchange for being a virtual outcast in the society that spawned him or her.

Comedy is essentially an antisocial activity, and its practitioners are often marginalized. When's the last time you had a drink with a clown? And I don't mean that weird guy from Accounting, either.

I'm not saying I'm marginalized, of course. Sure, I marginalize myself in many ways - avoiding television, staying out of retail stores, pursuing math as a hobby and the like - but I'm aware that I'm not nearly funny enough to suffer the Clown Curse. I'm just procrastinating the writing of the newsletter.