Ha ha? No.
I was thinking about the unspeakably bizarre and long-lasting crossover in American politics, whereby both JFK and Obama are heroes to the Left and villains to the Right.

JFK, the first president to oppose the USSR, an out-of-control heterosexual who used and tossed women like toilet paper, a great tax-cutting friend of big business. JFK, Hero of the Left.

Obama, an old-fashioned husband and father, the greatest protector of fraudulent and monopolistic banks and insurers since Harding, a great expander of oil drilling and nuclear power after years of Gaian restriction by Bush. Obama, Hero of the Left.

Why isn't this the funniest joke ever written? It fits strictly into the 'exploded incongruity' category of humor, which involves building a little world, then seducing the listener into occupying the world, then exploding the world.

Trying to explore this, I bumped into something that doesn't solve the problem but maybe illustrates it better than I could.

This PDF about PDQ is a scholarly disquisition on Peter Schickele's musical humor. Sample paragraph:

Interestingly, the transgression does not arise by introducing some musically bizarre deviation. In fact, Schickele's succession from supertonic to tonic in a weak-to-strong metrical context is musically banal. The supertonic to tonic transition is the most frequently occuring melodic movement from supertonic with a probability of 0.33. By contrast, Beethoven's original melodic movement to the raised dominant is the rarest continuation from supertonic in Western music with a probability less than 0.0007.

It's EXACTLY the same humorless soulless analysis of music that Schickele set out to parody in the first place. Except this humorless soulless analysis is applied humorlessly and soullessly to Schickele's parody of humorless and soulless analysis.

Why is this hugely annoying instead of funny? Because it's never resolved. Not into the supertonic or into the raised dominant with 0.0007 nonBayesian correlation. The author never realizes what he's doing. The dissonance just hangs in the air.

Same with American politics. The wildly dissonant convoluted multi-layered inversion just hangs there, consuming our thoughts and souls for 50 years.



= = = = =

Sidenote: The opposite side of this twist, the leftist hatred of Comrade Nixon and Comrade Bush, is even stranger. I wanted to focus on the humor aspect here, so kept it simple.

Labels: Danbo, Loughnerian Logic

  ¶ 7:00 AM