The Results of a Three Item Scavenger Hunt

While Comic Relief is never going to be placed in my top 500 Reading List, if I were honest – and I always am – I’d have to admit there are a few points worth remembering.

            The first is humor can be positive. As a person who self-defense mechanism is humor this is welcomed news. Many people don’t understand that telling a joke or “making light” of a situation doesn’t necessarily mean someone doesn’t take something seriously. In a group setting, humor can be used to diffuse a heated situation and bring everyone back to a useful mindset. Humor can also help ease confrontation, in the right situation, so as to make it seem less harsh.

            The second is while humor definitely has many positive attributes, there are some negative ones to watch out for. For instance, humor in the wrong situation can be insincere, inconsiderate, and insensitive. Humor is subjective and as such is highly unpredictable. Reactions to a certain joke vary in different audiences and with individual people depending on their personal backgrounds. For example, blonde jokes may be seen as offensive in a room full of blonde women, but often in mixed company or in an audience without a blonde, the joke may be responded to better.

            The third is wit is better than joke telling. My reasons for liking this one are highly selfish. I believe myself a wit. I enjoy collecting situations in which something hilarious was said or dead in the spur of the moment. Candid humor is the best kind of humor in my book, because it is unstudied and it tells more about the psyche of a person in my way of thinking. So, when Morreall said that he believes people become bored with joke tellers and that they stunt the conversation and kill the flow of ideas, it felt like validation. It’s silly that even validation from a source I don’t much care for can excite me, but, in this case, it did.

            So while every aspect of Morreall’s writing may not be of the highest caliber there are some things to take away from it positively. Some. Not a lot. But some. He has valid points but the way in which he presents them forces his audience to become hostile to his message. As I read other works that are clearly comic or meant to be funny, I witness some of his clearer points in action. But not until the author presenting that comic work wins me over do I recognize the greatness of the idea or even consider that Morreall might have been a little correct. Sorry, Morreall.