Tough gig here. A weekend in Key West holding forth on the subject of humor with a lot of funny people. A pundit's work is never done.
Actually, being earnest about humor is deadly -- if you have to explain a joke, you kill it. Fortunately, the participants in the Key West Literary Seminar did little analysis and a lot of rock 'n' roll. Garry Trudeau, creator of "Doonesbury," is also a comic essayist on occasion and was once inspired by Real Life to write the results of an interview of Madonna conducted by a Hungarian journalist. He asked questions in Hungarian, she replied in English, then it was all translated into Hungarian and then re-translated back into English.
Q: Let us cut towards the hunt: Are you a bold hussy woman that feasts on men who are tops?
A: I am working like a canine all the way around the clock.
There was some agreement, I think, on the proposition that jokes, though often funny, are inferior to wit and storytelling as comic art forms. I could be wrong about that. I have always aspired to wit and rarely achieve it -- I'm one of those people who always thinks of the right thing to say 20 minutes after the opportunity has passed. Well, sometimes, hours after, days even, OK, years too. I would love to be able to come up with the right line at the right time and am in some awe of those who can. Roger Rosenblatt, the somber essayist on the Lehrer "NewsHour," turns out to be surprisingly good at this.
One of my favorite examples of wit came during a game played by the Round Table set at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the 1920s. They threw a word at you, and you had to use it immediately in a funny sentence. Dorothy Parker got "horticulture" and promptly said, "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her drink." more...
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=18396
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