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My previous post included a "bit" about an academic’s website that was unusually slick and self-promotional. I mentioned that one of the techniques employed in that bit was an exaggeration, and I asked if you could think of another.
The answer is a parody. In a parody, the comedian deliberately imitates the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre in order to make fun of it. That bit used parody to imitate both the average academic’s website and the slick and self-promotional website, putting them side-by-side so as to accentuate the contrast between them. Parody can come across as witty or clever, but there is often an undercurrent of cruelty and/or an attempt to "put someone in their place" or "bring them down a peg or two."
The format of this new blog will be much the same as that last one. I’ll start off with another bit that I’ve been working on, followed by a brief analysis of the methods it employs:
I teach the psychology of creativity: how the creative process works, how the capacity for creativity evolved, the personality traits of creative people, and so forth. The main personality trait of creative people is "openness to experience," which means you love doing new things and meeting new people and going to new places. I try to use examples when I teach, to etch the new concepts and ideas more deeply into the student’s neural substrate, as it were.
So, I explain openness to experience by telling the students about something that happened shortly after I moved to California. I was hanging out with my new, super-fun friends, and I was in the back seat of an old van, and the person in the passenger’s seat leaned over to the person in the driver’s seat and said: “Joseph, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to be driving drunk while you’re flying on acid.” And Joseph said, “It’s fine; I do it all the time.”
And as I was registering this, I looked out the window, and we were getting onto a freeway ramp. This freeway ramp was so high off the ground, it was like being at the top of a Ferris wheel; the lights of L.A. were whizzing by, and off in the distance the Hollywood sign was blaring, and that was just the beginning of the wild, swooping daisy chain of cloverleaf figure-eights that comprised this particular onramp.
And the onramp was just the beginning… then we were on the freeway itself. Now I’m no country bumpkin. I grew up in Ottawa, and I had been on the Queensway, Ottawa’s most impressive freeway, but the Queensway did not prepare me for the freeway I encountered that day in L.A. There were about 12 lanes, in each direction, and any driver that let a fraction of a hair’s width between their car and the next was instantly intercepted by another vehicle swooping in from the left or the right or careening across multiple lanes to grab the space.
Both front-seat windows of the van were wide open but even louder than the wind whizzing by, and the scratchy sound of "Roxy Roller" playing from the car’s tape deck, was the asthmatic gasping of the van as it struggled to keep up with the cavalcade of sporty vehicles on the freeway that day. In fact, for some reason, my awareness had drifted to the van’s motor. I had this weird, heightened consciousness of its every wheezy, stuttering movement, as if I had become lodged into the motor, or become part of the motor. I guess I should have mentioned that I, too, was on acid for the first time in my life.
Yet, cutting straight through the chaos of my mental state at that moment, with crystal clarity, like a beam of white light, was the recognition that I may be a little too "over-endowed" with the trait of "openness to experience." Well, I didn’t know the scholarly term for it at that point, but I had a pronounced, first-hand understanding of the concept. And that little instant of self-understanding and the promise I made—if I got out of there alive—to be a little more risk-averse may be why I am alive now to tell this tale.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is that "openness to experience" may be beneficial for creativity, but it’s not so good for other things… like survival. So, if you have this trait, great, but if you don’t, that’s actually not such a bad thing.
Speaking of acid and transportation, remember a while back when the Germans announced they are coming out with a new airline that allows people to smoke on the plane, just like back in the good old days? Well, you could push that idea a little further and have an airline that passes out tabs of acid as the plane is taking off. The slogan would be “Fly high with AcidAir.”
My friend and I also picked a name for the Germain airline: FumAir. Unfortunately, you have to speak French to get that joke.
It’s nice to be at the front of the room without the expectation that I’m supposed to teach you something. Without someone asking: Will this be on the exam? Do we have to remember the name of the freeway in Ottawa or just be able to recognize it in a set of possible answers in a multiple-choice question?
So that’s the bit. Now let’s consider what techniques are used in it.
First, notice that, as Freud pointed out long ago, a lot of humor concerns topics that are, in some sense, forbidden, like sex or aggression. Jokes that involve sex or aggression are called tendentious. Jokes about drugs and alcohol don’t technically qualify as tendentious, but they too have a "forbidden" aspect, since they are widely illegal (particularly when paired with driving), and associated with poor choices and an irresponsible lifestyle.
Freud suggested that, through humor, "forbidden" material originating in unconscious desires is allowed expression, because, in this form, it is perceived as more agreeable or acceptable. Moreover, the bit is by a professor, which is a profession that might evoke expectations of a responsible, upstanding citizen. This sets up a contrast between that expectation and the admission of being in a situation involving LSD, and this kind of contrast and violation of expectations can be perceived as humorous.
There are other things we can point to, as well. The part, “an airline that passes out tabs of acid as the plane is taking off,” is called the punchline, or punch, because the audience now gets the joke, and understands the whole point of the setup: the initial, preparatory part of the joke that creates expectations that are eventually violated. The phrase “tabs of acid” within the punchline is the reveal because it’s at exactly that instant that the audience gets the joke.
The part about the slogan, “Fly high with AcidAir,” is a tag, because it plays off the previous joke and doesn’t require a new setup.
Where it says, “We also picked a name for the Germain airline: FumAir,” that could potentially also be considered a tag. Actually, though, that paragraph starts out talking about the German airline, then shifts to AcidAir, and then goes back to the German airline, so I suppose it’s more accurate to consider it some kind of twisted meta-tag.
