![]() ![]() ![]() I have selected this word for its denotative meaning - i.e. Nobody attends church anymore, but we all still have to go to the gym.Ībove all, it is glib. It is strongly influenced by camp, both in its use of self-deprecation - the voice of 21st-century humor is anxious and assumes that we are, too - and in its gleeful substitution of aesthetics for the discredited values of the past. ![]() It is selectively irreverent, willing to make catty remarks about what people are wearing to the funeral but dead serious about the importance of, for example, voting for Joe Biden. If the idea of funny without jokes strikes you as impossible, I invite you to consider the dominant mode of prose humor for the last 30 years - the New Yorker stuff, the gossip-blog stuff, the read-aloud-on-NPR stuff, whose tone has so thoroughly suffused the upper middle class of print and web media that we don’t even recognize it as a tone anymore. In his short essay “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain describes the difference between humor and comedy: while comedy looks for laughs in inherently funny subjects and events, the humorous story “bubbles gently along.” Comedy is about jokes, in other words, while humor is about tone. ![]()
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