Portfolio Time!?!?!? 3/29

OKAY. HERE WE GO. GRAND FINALE NUMBER 2 ISH.

So I actually read some of that poorly written Hokenson book and found that while I dislike the language, I enjoyed the points being made. Hokenson moves through history, explaining the role of humor as an agent in challenging and redefining the societies where it resides. While I much more appreciate humor as it relates to individual identity, I feel like the concept naturally must go hand-in-hand with humor as a piece of the social identity. Reading Hokenson, I more or less got the same idea from the many examples she provides in the text.

This is the idea that humor serves as a two sided fun house mirror of sorts in relation to society. On one hand, it is reflecting our values in our faces and setting the stage, on the other, it is distorting our values and constantly causing us to redefine what is and isn't "funny". I mean, and this is truly a constant cycle I'm talking about here. Jokes that may have been funny in the 1970's (a rather violent time in media history) might be seen as vulgar today.

Hokenson talks a bunch about comedy in the theatre as it related to social identity, so I tested out her theories by reading The Mandrake by Niccolo Machiavelli, an Italian Renaissance philosopher. It's five acts and I kind of felt like I was reading a Will Farrell movie. None of the characters were like, good people. There is a huge amount of deception and sleeping with your friend's wife. Fun. Also, nobody really gets punished for like being a douche. Usually in old comedies, the good people win and there's a marriage. Yeah there's a marriage, but like everyone's still a douche. It's a really raunchy play too.

Anyways, this play was written because the Italian higher ups in Florence basically Facebook Unfriended Machiavelli and he was like hella salty about it. He basically thought politicians and authority figures were a deceitful doodyheads who would do literally anything to maintain their power. Hence, now we have Machiavellianism, which is a pretty legit personality type in psychology. People who are Machiavellian have a natural knack for being deceptive, conniving little pricks. It just goes to show that mistrusting your government was never a new idea. I'mlookin at you millenials!!!! *incriminates a mirror*.

And this ties back to the TEDx Talk about the very structure of humor, doesn't it? Humor is about benign violations, and the way Hokenson describes how humor and its theories have evolved through different time frames feels very familiar. Because humor is a benign violation, if a bunch of people consistently find the same things funny, they will feel less and less violated by the same things as time goes on. It's a psychology thing. As different things happen in society, different kinds of humor become more or less funny. This shifts a lot.

BUT THE INTERVIEWS I CONDUCTED WITH PEOPLE AND THE ARTICLES I READ IN UNIT ONE TELL A DIFFERENT STORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or at least change the way the story is told! Yes, humor is universal because there is always something to laugh at. But, in Modern America at least, the Internet is changing the game. Now, collaborating to find something funny is more of a choice because now all the rhetorical power and all the information in the world is literally at our fingertips. The Internet encourages individualism in us. Which is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, face to face interaction is still cooler in my opinion, but it automatically makes one less of an individual because there is an inherent desire to be agreeable in public. It's manners and what not. The Internet is also pretty much a public space, but most people don't use it that way. More accurately, the Internet represents an infinite number of private spaces that people can plug into at their leisure. By spending our free time surfing on the web and whatnot, we're individualizing our own sense of right and wrong, good and bad, and our own sense of humor. Everybody is taking in the constant flow of information (and misinformation) and formulating their own perspectives.

This explains why the people I interviewed were the same age in the same place, but had utterly different senses of humor. The social identity IS the individual identity. Whoa.




REFLECTION TIME!!!


The annoyingly wordy book helped provide a nice framework for unit 2. It helped in like connecting so many dots. I mean I spent most of my project time trying to friggin make it through the thing, looking up phrases and stuff. 

The project pretty much became getting through that book because I knew a smart person who does smart things wrote it so the more I hopelessly stared at the pages the more I would find out. 

Frankly, I'm glad I did that because now everything seems so like solidified and goes beyond like article analysis. I wish there were more academic articles about like humor in a sociological frame that lays out a wide blanket on the topic. I found stuff but it was usually way too specific.

As for the new sources I used, that was pretty much the main thing. But it was a difficult source and it was pretty much holy grail tier because it fit so dang well into my argument and looks so pretty next to my other sources. It was packed with capital I Information too.

I still would have preferred Hokenson use smaller words and wrote a bigger book. I'm still mad about that.

Moving forward, I guess the next question would be specific to American Humor. How did "funny" get to become individualized like it is for my generation? Was it just the Internet or SOMETHING MOOOORE?!!???!?!??????!?!????????!??!?!??


*Unit 2*