Jackson Radcliffe's Blog - Posts Tagged "jokes"
What are you laughing at?
When I started writing, I adopted a humorous tone, even when writing about serious topics. I thought this was because I couldn’t take myself too seriously as a writer, and that’s probably true. But there’s more to it.
Humour punctures holes in big ideas. It undermines conventions and stands the world on its head. It goads us into questioning things that seem self-evident or beyond debate.
Comedians are everyday philosophers, helping us look at our world through fresh eyes. With my writing, I’m exploring my beliefs about the world and trying to articulate a coherent world view. And you can’t do that without having a few laughs along the way.
In fact, the concept of a coherent world view may turn out to be the ultimate cosmic joke. What if, instead, humour turned out to be the universe’s guiding principle?
This article was first published at my personal blog, Blog Blogger Bloggest.
Humour punctures holes in big ideas. It undermines conventions and stands the world on its head. It goads us into questioning things that seem self-evident or beyond debate.
Comedians are everyday philosophers, helping us look at our world through fresh eyes. With my writing, I’m exploring my beliefs about the world and trying to articulate a coherent world view. And you can’t do that without having a few laughs along the way.
In fact, the concept of a coherent world view may turn out to be the ultimate cosmic joke. What if, instead, humour turned out to be the universe’s guiding principle?
This article was first published at my personal blog, Blog Blogger Bloggest.
So you think that’s funny?
Why does comedy so often involve human suffering? People slip on banana skins. They act stupid. Outrageous things happen to them. And we laugh.
Are we monsters? Do we relish the suffering of others?
Or is laughter a self-defence mechanism? Instead of being a sign of depravity, it’s a way of coping with living in a world that is profoundly and shockingly unsympathetic to human existence.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we laugh till we cry; that our laughter comes with tears. If we didn’t laugh at misfortune, we’d have to sob instead.
It seems fitting that my first novel, The Yoga Sutras, was a comedy. It reflects an unconscious inability to treat myself seriously as a writer, even though my writing is terribly serious to me - a matter of life and death.
So by all means laugh at my jokes. But please don’t laugh at my ideas, because I would hate that. It’s probably what a writer fears most, after obscurity. That's the greatest fear. To be ignored would be horrible. So awful I might have to laugh.
Are we monsters? Do we relish the suffering of others?
Or is laughter a self-defence mechanism? Instead of being a sign of depravity, it’s a way of coping with living in a world that is profoundly and shockingly unsympathetic to human existence.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that we laugh till we cry; that our laughter comes with tears. If we didn’t laugh at misfortune, we’d have to sob instead.
It seems fitting that my first novel, The Yoga Sutras, was a comedy. It reflects an unconscious inability to treat myself seriously as a writer, even though my writing is terribly serious to me - a matter of life and death.
So by all means laugh at my jokes. But please don’t laugh at my ideas, because I would hate that. It’s probably what a writer fears most, after obscurity. That's the greatest fear. To be ignored would be horrible. So awful I might have to laugh.
