Are puns funny?

what makes something funny?

laughing and feeling something SHOULD be funny are two different things. one is an emotional reaction, one is a more cerebral, cognitive one.

now, to make things easy, i shall state that “funny” is ONLY for the emotional reaction (actual laughter).

what makes things funny, in my opinion is some clear lack of apprehention of reality.

it could be another person having an observable failure in that regard, or a passing thought that is markedly insane.

a guy slipping on a banana, gets a laugh, from almost every one and every age group. the poor fellow fails to be aware of banana peels and their dangers. additionally, his goofiness, might also be funny because he is not aware or is brazenly disregarding social norms.

great, that takes care of all of slapstick.

jokes May be funny if some element of the joke shows such a lack of awareness. i used to be a big fan of black humor. all kinds of dead kids’ jokes, dead starving people hilarity.

now, i will definitely not enjoy an actual even of death, violance at all. but having such an extremely evil thought is clearly insane and as such it is funny . (i realize that some will not agree, and since i had a baby of my own, i have not enjoyed this kind of humor either.)

what is funny about some jokes is not the details of the joke, but the lack of awareness and sensitivity which you purposely created.

perhaps at some level, humor has a way to show us what NOT to think and steer us clear of psychosis.

delivery seems to be a big thing with funny. you are funny because you act out some sort of insanity.

insanity and absurdity go hand in hand. we laugh at the absurdity of an increasingly alianting, complex reality, which causes us anxiety as we understand less and less of it.

my favorite example of absurdity is the Monty Python skit about the spanish armada (i hope it could be found on youtube..) the court of queen Elizabeth I is dressed in period costumes, the herald walks in to warn of the threatnong spanish fleet . only ALL of the cast are visibly sitting on Suzuki motorpads. of course we expect another historical drams, but this one is apprently directed by a japanese director, and so , Suzukis for everyone!! . (i believe both Suzukis and Kurasawa’s films were becoming widespread at the time).

irony and satire may be funny in extreme situations, but it is rare to find it causeing you to laugh outright.

the situation, delivery and the occurance are crucial to determin weather something is funny or merely amusing/humerous. sometimes a comedic situation will best be served by seeming to be failing at being funny, causing us to laugh at the orchestrated failure.

laughter in many people can be provoked by unintelligent means. slapstick will never be a great demonstration of the intelect. neither do sitcoms and canned laughter. indeed, many things that are funny are idiotic or even cruel.

which brings us to puns.

puns are complex arrangments of words that form a meaning that is contrary to what is expected at first.

thus ’see you on the flip-side will mockingly turn to ’flip you on the seaside.

there is a use of homophones to cleverly convey a contrary message.

in many languages, puns and other plays on words have been a common and even dominant forms of humor.

spoonerisms, a close causin of puns, the unintentional mixing up of syllables to produce a confused orgarbled message, are also very common. ‘are puns funny?’ will inadvertantly come out as ‘are funs punny?’ this is often used to convey an absent-minded, nervous, or even drunken mental condition.

And now for the argument at hand:

while puns may be very humorous, and witty, i have to say that they do not cause me to laugh. i know they may seem funny, i know they should be funny, but they are just amusing at best.

they do not cause an emotional reaction on par with other funny products.

it could be my own fault, maybe I’m too jaded, but a witty pun will not get me rolling, while my baby stealing my wallet would (Though not while i’m running after her..).

‘funny’ and ‘amusing’ are connected at some cognitive level. but while the funny occurance will provoke an explosive emotional reaction, amusing will not. i posit that puns are too cognitively complex to get an immidiate reaction, and because of that, other cognitive mechanisms will restrain a fullblown reaction.

Perhaps, if puns were delivered as part of a joke, or a comedy bit, and the comedian will exploit the fact that they are not funny, as an example of the aforementioned orchastrated failure, then they will be funny as a contextual element. i can imagine John Cleese, or Andy Kaufman deliberately failing to be funny, and thus succeeding in being funny.but as a direct attempt to raise a laugh, puns a not funny.