My Descent into Madness…

… can be described thusly:

As you can see, as time has gone by, my appreciation of language-based humor has become stronger and stronger… and inevitably, more “granular.” A friend recently told me “I don’t know anybody that appreciates typos as much as you.” And it is true. My recent dissection and adoption of “HAW” (link) illustrates this perfectly.

So if you refer to the chart, you can see how appreciation and usage rise pretty steadily together, until the “point of no return”, which i am well beyond now. After this point, my appreciation hits some sort of critical mass and i begin telling jokes based on other jokes… layer upon layer… so as the appreciation continues to rise steadily, my usage rises exponentially.

And as my usage goes through the roof, the jokes become more “inside” (requiring more and more explanation for those who haven’t been following along the whole time)… and accessibility falls off… What i find funny becomes so exclusive that it appears to be complete gibberish to the underprivileged masses.

The vertical line on the left with the +/- signs should probably say “level of gibberish.” The “point of no return” is really the point where the level of gibberish builds too quickly for the general public. But after thinking about this a while, it got me thinking about humor in general… are ALL jokes “gibberish” to some extent? What makes something “funny?”… Remember that scene in Short Circuit where Steve Guttenberg tests the robot for sentience by seeing if it could understand jokes? Getting a computer to understand the humor in “why did the chicken cross the road” is not a simple task. It must be more than the level or irony that makes something “funny”… It’s fascinating that a good sense of humor appears to be proof of free-thought or something… It’s all gibberish to a machine. So is gibberish evidence of free thought? Is the soul rooted in madness?

It’s like they say… there is no right or wrong… just popular opinion. Everybody is insane. You hear of those creative genius types whose art is argued over as being either “pointless” or “genius”… Are these people simply somewhere slightly above that “point of no return?”… and the crazy cat lady who stands on the corner laughing at passing traffic… is she just so high up on the gibberish level that she’s totally left us all behind? Maybe she’s not lost in there. Maybe she’s simply sight-seeing in higher realms of human experience.

So yeah… to all you janky people who continually crack me up with all the engrish and all the “wat?” and “feh” and all the numbers embedded in your exclamation points… keep it up. And to you i dedicate a hearty HAW. Carry on.

Tags: haw, humor, psychology, spirituality