I’ve been trying a little witnessed consciousness of late, hoping to get a better handle on that age-old question, “Daddy, where do jokes come from?”
What I discovered surprised me. This isn’t true every time, but a lot of the time, right before I make a joke, it turns out that there’s this moment when I realize a joke’s hanging out there, ready to be made before I actually know what the joke is. Someone will say something, or I’ll read something, or a cat will jump on something, and my “shtick sense” will start tingling. “Potential comedy, now in vicinity.”
So I’Il start poking around to see if I can find it — it’s like I’m trying to locate a chair in a dark room. Sometimes the chair’s small and the room’s large. Other times the chair’s large and the room’s small.
I’d never picked up on this before in part because the whole process tends to move pretty fast, and in part because I think I’m just generally too dang giddy with, “Hey! A joke!” to stop and take notes.
But it’s a little odd, isn’t it?
I’m going to make a leap and assume this isn’t just a quirk of me, but it’s the way shtick is sometimes formed. If that’s true, what does it mean? What does it mean that our nether-brains can sense the presence of a joke before our conscious minds know what’s so funny? And that those same nether-brains don’t bother to share the joke with our conscious minds, but instead just give a nod to say, “Hey — pally — joke opportunity here”…?
Does it mean that our subconscious mind likes to tell jokes to itself in nether-brain-ese, and is sort of a jerk?
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
that’s been exactly my experience… The sense that a joke is latent, in a potential state, waiting to be precipitated out of the air. At its best it’s analogous to that musician’s conceit that the music is playing through them. It’s humbling, being an instrument of the funny, and not its author.
I love this one. Doesn’t it tick you off when you make the joke and people laugh, but you know (secretly) that it wasn’t the “right” one? That happens to me all the time.
cec, another fascinating observation. i also think it’s a learned response, feedback loop thingy, to use sophisticated psychology jargin of the time. synapses are trained, fine tuned, biochemical brain reactions perfected. i think therefore i joke, better. robin williams being the most evolved joke being.