It has come to my attention that some things I think uproariously funny are not at all funny to others. A couple of recent examples:
Sarah Silverman said this as part of her standup act a long while ago. I repeated it once when seated at a table next to a gay relative, openly so and married to another gay man. It was somewhat uncomfortable, not because he as gay, as we’ve all gotten over that. It was because he seemed above it all, the gathering we were at, the drinking and family tensions. So I decided to take a chance, and repeat the Silverman line to him.
“Recently I was licking jelly off of my boyfriend’s penis, when suddenly it occurred to me. Oh my God, I’ve become my mother!”
He laughed, hard and genuinely. Turns out he liked Silverman. I’d like to say it broke the ice, but I did not get to sit next to him again as he left the gathering to return to his life. I repeated that joke in the comments in a post below, and instead of laughter was chastised by Krausler, who has no regard for Silverman and had nothing but unkind words for her.
So be it. I took another tack, and in the same thread repeated a joke I heard from the late Tommy Magliozzi (1937-2014), brother of Ray and co-host of Car Talk, which went off the air around the time of his death. He suffered from Alzheimer’s. The brothers did a couple of thousand shows, and they are now all available as podcasts. I have listened to all of them before, but each one is brand new to me now. The brothers were unschooled in show business (I suppose someone is now going to tell me they are/were Phoenicians), but both graduated from MIT in engineering. WBUR in Boston originated the show, and in 1977 opened a platform for local auto mechanics to come in and answer car-related questions from callers. The two were the only ones to show up.
They must have demonstrated some spark, as their producer Doug Berman once referred to them as “diamonds in the rough”. They became regular hosts of a Saturday show I became aware of around that time, Car Talk. It aired on our local NPR station in Billings, Montana, Yellowstone Public Radio. We had to be driving somewhere to hear it, as I never turned on a radio outside a car. Then or now.
For YPR, I suspect, it was a major fundraising vehicle. The manager of the station, Marvin Granger, looked down his nose upon the program, obviously beneath him. He was a man, his friends say, who read voraciously, but all I could ascertain from that was that his intellectual worth was derived from conventional wisdom, say Bob Woodward and the like, and that he never strayed the path. He once cited to me as gospel a book written about conspiracy theory and “theorists” that demeaned it as intellectual rubbish and the product of deformed minds.
YPR would do the usual bit of fundraising and pledges (unknown to us that all of NPR was well-funded and not in need of any local boosting, as it is the intellectual flip side of the coin called “Fox News”), and I remember pledging at least twice. We were asked to name the program that we wished to dedicate our pledge to, and I said “Car Talk.” I think I did that just to irritate Marvin. Another time they were doing fundraising, and callers were asked to dedicate pledges to their dogs. People were calling in with their stuffy high-falutin’ breeds, as if Best of Show dogs did not shit on the carpet. The minimum pledge was $25, but I called in and dedicated $10 to my fat and stupid Springer Spaniel. That got a laugh, as the pledge went through on the air.
I once mentioned to Marvin that pledges should be dedicated to “Nina Totenbag”, referencing the cheap premiums they would offer to those who pledged more than $10 to fat and stupid dogs. Marvin did not laugh, and thus do I return to my second joke, which I just heard on Tuesday courtesy of the late Tommy Magliozzi. He claimed to have gotten it from a Chrysler executive – Tom and Ray were hard on auto manufacturers, especially so on Chrysler, which made the joke that much more delightful.
I roughly quote it even as it would be easy to go back and transcript the original.
“A certain automaker was very proud of its product and the precision with which they were made. They claimed that their vehicles were airtight and even said that if one were to put a cat in one of them at night, so airtight was the construction that by morning the cat would be dead from lack of oxygen. A Chrysler executive made the same claim for Chrysler products, and as proof, the company in fact one night placed a cat in one of their vehicles to prove that point. The next morning the cat was gone.”
Tommy had a habit of laughing hard at his own humor, which made it all the more enjoyable. I laughed out loud at the joke above. Why? For one, it was self-deprecating humor from a Chrysler executive. I love self-deprecating humor. For another, the punchline, just as with Silverman above, was completely unexpected.
I put that joke in the comments, and the only response was a reference to Schrodinger’s cat, completely off point, and more importantly, off-humor.
I realized at that time that regarding humor, I walk alone. One of my favorite jokes regards existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He was sitting alone at a table on a Parisian sidewalk cafe. When the waitress appeared, he ordered coffee, without cream. There was a delay, and finally the waitress reappeared and said “I am sorry Môssieur. We are all out of cream. Would you instead like your coffee without milk?”
OK, too subtle for most, and somehow involving an understanding, if such a thing exists, of existential philosophy. Nonetheless, I love it.
I have been introspecting as of late, wondering about myself and my place in this world. I have written about so many things, from Janis Jolin and Pete Ham to Columbine to Jonestown, none of it fit for dinnertime conversation. I write on this blog using my own name, and my family members are aware of that, but never venture here. It’s as if they are all infected with the Marvin Granger bug, that it is beneath them. That’s OK, and allows me freedom to explore, usually outward, but lately inward.
I’ve happened upon some insights and recent experiences that I want to write about, and will do so. I did not sit down to write about dead cats this morning, but there I went again.
Piece of Mindful 
So, this bear squats down to take a shit next to a rabbit. “Hey”, says Smokey, “do you ever have trouble with shit sticking to your fur?” Roger glances up cautiously and says, “Why no, Sir.” Smokey says “Good,” as he picks up Roger and wipes his own ass with him.
George Carlin was a god.
I laughed hard to some of Jim Gaffigan – especially the bits about Hot Pockets and [W]affle House.
Wifey and I saw a live act near our home whilst I had a very painful jammed kidney stone… vodka did not work, but laughter of this dude just ripping apart Generation Slacker and “drivers” in general cured all.
As stupid and slapstick as they were, I STILL laugh at some of the Three Stooges routine.
Subjective, for sure, as we are human.
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Humor is indeed subjective. We all specialize. Conan O’Brien expresses wonder at Gaffigan, that the guy is so prolific. Most comedians struggle to come up with an hour’s worth of new material in a year, but Gaffigan seems to do so monthly.
One of my favorites is Dimetri Martin, whose only objective is to tell jokes, not to say anything meaningful. He does guitar jokes, which pros frown upon. He does drawings on stage, both-handed, and very funny. And he observes the world and comments, as when he notices that when a sign says “Bridge may be icy” that it is exactly the same as “Bridge might not be icy”. Either is correct, but not to the same effect.
Martin earned a scholarship to NYU law school. He quit after three years, saying that law requires great effort and precision and that he is not that way. He was asked by Stephen Colbert why he quit when so close to graduation, and he said “My parents were dangerously close to being proud of me.”
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THIS IS FUNNY.
There was a delay, and finally the waitress reappeared and said “I am sorry Môssieur. We are all out of cream. Would you instead like your coffee without milk?”
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That makes two of us!
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GDR joke, all you need to know is certain import fruits were rare: A woman comes into a shop, looks around, asks: No oranges? Answer: We got no bananas, no oranges next door!
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This is a link to Over the Edge, a forever running radio show out of Berkeley Ca. Produced by the noise band, Negativland. https://archive.org/details/ote?tab=collection If you’re like me and like sound collage and the sons of Firesign Theater, this is for you. In this episode linked below, car salesman supreme, Dick Goodbody, somewhere in the morass, tells the cream/milk joke. (Okay, this may be an acquired taste, but as background noise, it’s very occasionally side splitting)https://archive.org/details/OTE_19830800_Chevy_Pride_Week
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Wow! Back when Chevy was king. It has a Bob and Ray feel about it, the host should introduce himself as ”’lee Balloo, part of their schtick where they would always cut to him in the middle of the word “Wally”.
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https://archive.org/details/OTE_20021114_Bob_and_Ray_Show
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Never once do we hear from either of them anything resembling a punchline. It is all situational, the characters dead serious, the delivery kind of a suppressed surprise when crazy shit is going on. Brilliant comedy, which now described, becomes less so.
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I liked Car Talk, used to tune in regularly. Now their weekend comedy show, at least in my city, is Wait Wait don’t tell me. Not always terrible.. Paula Poundstone usually improves it, or did when she was on more regularly. They used to have another humor quiz show I forget the name, that was actually challenging and the players were real wits, clever northeast WASP types I guess. What did you or others think of Prairie Home Companion? I give it high marks for being a live broadcast that assembled a great mix of talent week after week, commenting on news and personalities of the day (including poking fun at other npr hosts and shows, doing voice impressions etc.)
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I enjoyed Wait wait … until the pandemic, when, as with baseball and other sports, they did shows without audiences. The Wait Wait cast, of course, NPR liberals, were totally 100% behind the scam.
If I ever come across it (it was late in their run as I recall) I will somehow play that part of an episode of Car Talk where Ray introduces their latest fake employee, staff tailor Hugh Jass. Tommy hears it, and then giggles, then giggle becomes laugh, and then he is rolling under the desk laughing and Ray is trying to maintain professionalism. A gold moment.
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Yeah, Wait Wait is definitely on board with everything in any official narrative. Just like to dip in occasionally and see where they’re at, take the temperature of that room.
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Mark, I’m sorry you didn’t understand the connection between Schrodinger’s cat and the Ford vs Chrysler cat joke. Schrodinger originally intended his alive/dead cat thought experiment to be a joke critique of quantum mechanics superposition principal. But subsequent people who have no idea how science works have misinterpreted his joke as a real situation.
If you want further explanation, please send your address on the back of a $20 dollar bill to You can call me Ray, Harvard Sqaure, Cambridge, MA (our fair city), 02138.
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nicely done. That was a bit obtuse of me.
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No worries, like your point humor doesn’t always translate like a mathematical proof.
I enjoy the back and forth discussions here because it gives me food for thought on my morning walks. This week the concept of humor was occupying me.
Humor seems to me a taste you develop in childhood, that can change over time. It is heavily influenced by what you were exposed to, and you and your buddies turned into running jokes. Rather than explaining what I think is funny, I will give a list of examples of movies I have watched many times, that can always make me laugh. But I now won’t watch them more than once a year to preserve their healing properties (as a recent post described their ability to get us through tough periods like when you’re sick, or traveling and enduring boredom.
The list is Airplane, Caddyshack, Spinal Tap, Blues Brothers, with Holy Grail, Animal House, Annie Hall, Blazing Saddles, and Team America World Police as backups. They all have a lot of slapstick/physical humor, and jokes you could turn into a wink/nod with your friends as insider humor.
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I love that list, and thank you. It is time now and then to revisit some of these, and perhaps see for the first time Team America World Police new to me) and Young Frankenstein. Yes, I missed YF when it came out. On a plane flight recently, kind of desperate and tired of John Wicks, I watched Wolverine and Deadpool, and was surprised that it was a self-effacing parody, which I enjoyed. Ryan Reynolds has some comedic chops. I learned recently that when Conan referenced Deadpool during the Oscar’s and a man in costume did a somersault behind him, it was really Reynolds. In that Conan interview he described his father out mowing the lawn in his work shirt and necktie with sleeves rolled up, saying “This was a man who obviously did not know how to fuck.”
Sadly it’s a romcom, but Forget Paris is one of my favorites. In it Debra Winger shows comedic chops and Mickey (Billy Crystal) falls for her in Paris and they have a memorable time, and Mickey is so smitten that he wants to marry her, and she confesses she is already married. “You don’t do that!” he tells her, being all wonderful and then springing that on him. She’s crying and says “But he makes me unhappy!” He looks at her plaintively and says in a pleading tone “I can do that!”
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so I take it Olivia newton John’s granddad was one of the butts of the joke.
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Yes that is correct! I did not Olivia Newton John’s Granddad was Max Born. And according to wiki her family tree has at least one rabbi! Big surprise?! Thats pretty strong evidence of the Mathis effect (connected people getting the promotion).
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https://ethnicelebs.com/olivia-newton-john
At the above link, it states that ONJ’s father was Brinley “Bryn” Newton-John, an MI5 officer, who worked on the Enigma project at Bletchley Park.
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Yes mostly in Raman and infrared spectroscopy. I bought Miles books and was most interested in his work for a while. I don’t know about the truth on spinney photons, I don’t believe there’s sufficient experimental proof. It seems like a hybrid Einsteinian model, where he sets the speed of light as a constant, and has these “particles” of exact size (how that occurs not sure) spinning at discrete speeds. It seems like a good statistical mechanical model, but I have seen people use a fluid medium instead of particles to model charge. Anyhow, I a few years ago i spent more time on this but gave up due to lack of experimental data to backup Miles models – if it’s there i’d be interested in seeing the evidence. Unfortunately, Miles often posts data that looks like it was written on cocktail napkin, like the sunspot observations.
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Actually Schoedinger is my great-great-grandfather, along with Bohr – that is chemistry tree relatedness.
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i reckon you learned your eigenfunctions real good.
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I wish I had, because I’m trying to learn them better now. I never worked hard enough in math. I could get by by cramming for tests, but then you don’t really remember it. Now I’m trying to re-learn matrix algebra. Especially at an advanced age it’s not easy!
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