Not vulgar and disgusting, but SMART.
This summarizes a few things I have thought about being funny, but found hard to put into words.
The thing is, it's great when people laugh at your jokes. It's pretty intoxicating actually, almost like a hit of a drug.
Actually, the weirdest thing is when I just say something that I think is fact, and it makes people laugh. Laugh hysterically sometimes. I'm just calling it the way I see it, but that in itself is funny to people. That's the REALLY weird and neat part.
Anyway, this bit about connecting the dots makes a lot of sense to me.
The best writers and the funniest people connect the dots.
I read an article one time about this guy who was an aspiring novelist or screenwriter-can't remember now. Anyway, he would clip articles that he found interesting and intriguing (as all of us wordsmiths do). He was re-reading them, and put three different stories together and weaved his plot together and had a best-seller on his hands. Three different stories, different situations, different crimes/experiences, yet he wove them together, fictionalized them as one plot and hit the jackpot. I love that.
The idea that the New Yorker captions are a measure of either intelligence or being funny is total dog squeeze, of course, but some of the observations made by this pointy-head at the University of Mexico are correct.
"Gil Greengross, a University of Mexico anthropologist, thinks the secret
to being funny is being smart. In fact, he’s written that humor itself
is an “intelligence indicator.”
(DUH!!!!!)
“You need to be clever to see the things that are wrong in the world and
to make them okay,” McGraw said.
“Smart people are better-read and they
know more about the world. They can connect these dots.”
