Something to Laugh About

Andy Borowitz must have an unusual sense of humor. All of the stories I have read so far in his books are diverse. Some are classics and obviously humorous, such as Vacation ’58, while other are awkward and lack the normal view of what one considers funny, such as The Waltz and A Few Words about Breast. And then comes this weeks reading. They are funny because of the serious tone that each implores. As I have read these stories the past few weeks I have become more adept at identifying what I find humorous and what I most certainly do not.

Tips for Women: How to Have A Relationship with a Guy is one of the funnies pieces I have read. The vast amount of techniques he utilizes to make his point that guys do not think like women made me laugh one more than a few occasions. Right off the bat, Dave Barry uses an oldie but a goody in terms of humor devices-cognitive shift. His first line says “it’s fairly easy to develop a long term…relationship with a guy” and ends with revealing this male must be a dog. Ultimately this must bring a smile to your face. You cannot help but think this Barry’s opening line is clever. He hooks you in thinking he is going to reveal one of life’s oldest mysteries (how do men think) only to take that hope away and replace it with the common conception that dogs can be better for women than a man can be.

One of the best parts of this story was the author’s fictional interpretation of how different a man and women think when it comes to their private thoughts. This woman, Elaine, is so serious with every word she chooses and thinks about every detail of Roger’s inflection and face twitch, while Roger is merely thinking about his car. His narration of the women is down pat in my opinion. It is a stereotypical view of a woman’s thoughts, but it is so true and so inline with the typical woman that you cannot help but laugh. The humor of this dialogue back and forth between Roger and Elaine is not in the actual words that they exchange, but in Barry’s description of their thought processes. Roger is “glad to finally know the correct answer” to one of Elaine’s questions. I found this amusing because in most situations when a woman is crying for no apparent reason there is no correct answer a man can give and Barry picks up on that fact and uses it to further point out the differences between their thought processes.

I really rather enjoyed this piece of writing. Another quote that I could not help but smile at was in regard to why men are afraid of committing-“The fear that if you get attached to a woman, some unattached guy, somewhere, will be having more fun that you.” The fact that he boils the answer down to its most basic form is witty. Not to mention that logic, at least to women, is absurd. Women cannot comprehend this type of logic in their mind, but seeing it spelled out in black and white makes it genius in my mind and truly funny. This entire piece of literature was truly funny in my opinion and Barry is the only writer in the book so far that I have found to be truly worthy of being deemed one of the 50 best American writers.

While not quite up to par with David Barry on the humor level, The Onion is still a funny piece of literature. I think I like this genre of humor writing because it takes a serious tone about a non-serious issue. Similar to Barry’s story the humor is in the truth. Countries that do not use many vowels in their words are extremely difficult for Americans to pronounce, and adding vowels would be beneficial for our sake. Exaggeration is used often because the author uses names that do not use any vowels at all, but his point is made and in a comical way. The last paragraph in the story is humorous because the author is playing with the initial notion of delivering vowels but now insists on delivering consonants. The tone of the entire piece makes us laugh because he sounds serious but what he is describing is the furthest thing from serious.  Tone carries a lot of weight in this piece of literature and really brings the humor to light.