What’s So Funny?

(Rhetorical Analysis of a Work of Humor)

During the opening monologue of the 2015 Golden Globe Awards hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Tina Fey delivered the following joke:

George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year.

Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected to a three-person UN commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip.

So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.

The in-person audience of Hollywood celebrities laughed, as did I. We got the joke.

But what is the joke? Why do we recognize it as funny? And, perhaps more interestingly, what comment does this kind of joke make about the broader culture we live in?

Writing for National Public Radio, Linda Holmes said of the Clooney joke, “It makes for a particularly pointed and effective reminder that the adulation afforded to actors is not based on merit, that the celebrating of their careers doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny, and that a woman being glamorous and gorgeous and married to an actor doesn’t make her, first and foremost, that” (https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2015/01/12/376718642/what-those-george-clooney-jokes-know-about-red-carpet-culture).

It’s funny because it’s true. I may be reaching on this, but I also think the reverse fits: it’s true because it’s funny. When we laugh at this kind of joke, it’s often because our brains reflexively recognize something as true we haven’t necessarily specifically acknowledged or articulated before. It is true that we venerate celebrities out of proportion to their on-the-ground accomplishments. It is also true that women who marry famous men, no matter how accomplished they may be in their own right, are often reduced to what Linda Holmes calls a “red-carpet accessory.”

We can uncover and understand a lot about a culture by critically examining the culture’s artifacts—those things that are produced by the culture. Jokes are cultural artifacts.

In this experience, your job is to answer the questions, “What’s so funny?” and “What does it say about us that we find this particular thing funny?” by looking closely at a single humorous text.

AUDIENCE

Your audience is a curious bunch of people who enjoy being shown aspects of the culture they may not have immediately grasped. Your goal is to have the audience exclaim, “I never would have thought of that,” after reading your analysis.

They will not necessarily have experienced the text you’re parsing, so you’ll have to consider how to deal with that in your writing.

PROCESS

1. Find a humorous text.

You’ll want to choose something neither too long nor too short. A single joke may not be sufficient, but an entire stand-up routine may be too long. A bit from a standup comedian or a single sketch from a show like Saturday Night Live, Inside Amy Schumer, or Key & Peele often works well. It could be a written text like a cartoon or piece from the Onion or Reductress. Meme jokes can work well too, as memes are definitely cultural artifacts.

Choose something you genuinely think is funny that you also suspect contains a cultural subtext that may be relevant to your audience. You don’t need to grasp the subtext instantly. You just need to suspect it’s present, waiting to be unearthed.

It’s usually best to choose a text that is new to you, unless you’re confident you can see the familiar with fresh eyes.

2. Process the text.

For this experience, I’m recommending the previously mentioned practice I’d one day like to develop a handier acronym for but that for the time being goes by ROAS. You have my permission to try to get away with using it in a moment of desperation in a game of Bananagrams, but it isn’t actually a word.

React: First simply encounter the text as a living, breathing human being enjoying it. Once you’ve done this, record what happened. Where did you laugh? What kind of laugh was it? A rueful chuckle? All-out belly laugh? Something in between?

Observe: Look more closely at anything interesting you reacted to. What’s going on? Look for details you might have missed the first time around or perhaps look at the specifics of how the humor was crafted or delivered. You also can now observe your own response more closely. What’s happening to cause your laughter?

As you observe, ask questions of the text: Who would find it funny? What does the audience have to know to find it funny? Who gets it and who doesn’t get it? Would anyone not find it funny, or even be offended?

Analyze: Start to shape some of the observations into a theory. In the example above, Linda Holmes has noticed a trend in jokes about George Clooney’s marriage and extended that observation to a larger point about how women are treated in relation to famous men. She created insight and knowledge. Ultimately, for a fully realized piece of writing, you’ll need more than one bit, but see what conclusions you can draw from your observations.

Synthesize: This is what will happen as you draft your piece. You’ll work from those observations and bits of analysis, and hopefully have additional insights as you go. Think of it as a process of discovery in which what you have to say is revealed as you say it.

3. Write a discovery draft.

Working toward synthesis, start writing with the notion you may be surprised by what you find. Keep your audience in mind. Remember that they may not have experienced the text and may need some context to appreciate the observations and analysis that is to come.

For your audience (and yourself), think about how you’re showing your reasoning on the page, how the analysis is built from your initial response and observations. If you share your findings without helping the audience appreciate how you got there, they may be less inclined to accept your analysis.

Remember your purpose: to reveal the cultural subtext and meaning of the humorous text. It’s funny because it’s true. What’s the truth the text is telling?

4. Process your draft.

What have you done? Do you have a central idea? Often after a discovery draft, you may write your way into your main point, but it’s a little buried. If you had to write an old-school 140-character tweet conveying the main idea of your essay, what would it be?

If you’re having a hard time articulating your main idea, you may have what I call a “laundry list” draft, a bunch of individual items not yet unified. That’s fine—better than fine, even. As you look at the list, can you make connections among the different items? Look for that synthesis.

At any time, feel free to go back to the text you’re writing about and re-experience it, looking for fresh observations and analysis.

5. Revise.

This time around, as soon as you feel confident in your message, you’ll really want to be thinking of your audience as you revise. You’re walking them through an experience and subsequent analysis. Think of them being in the same state you were prior to all the thinking you’ve been doing about your text.

Try to anticipate any questions or confusion they may have and address it before, or just as, it arises.

6. Edit, polish.

When you’re writing for real people, this stuff always matters. This is the kind of piece that makes for ready content for culturally engaged websites. Give your piece a good title that will intrigue the audience.

7. Title.

The text you’ve analyzed probably deserves mentioning in the title. If people are familiar with it or its subject or creator, you might have them intrigued enough to start reading.

REFLECT

E. B. White said, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

Do you agree or disagree with the legendary children’s book author and writer of other stuff? Is the text you wrote about no longer funny? If so, why? What has killed it?

Has something of value replaced the humor, or do you wish you’d just left it all alone?

If you disagree, what’s E. B. White missing? What does he have wrong? Why does the funny stay funny?

REMIX

Find something you used to think was funny but are no longer amused by. What happened to change your response? For me, I’m thinking of Eddie Murphy’s stand-up routines from the 1980s, when I was a young teenager. At the time, I had the bits practically memorized, but today I find many of the jokes offensive, misogynistic, and especially homophobic. I cringe when I watch what used to split my sides.

What changed? Lots of things. I got older and my own attitudes changed, but clearly the biggest change has been in public attitudes toward the kind of subjects Eddie Murphy mined for his humor.

There’s something interesting in there I could explore in an open-ended piece of writing with no specific purpose other than to discover some fresh insight about this thing I noticed. See if there isn’t something for you to notice about something that’s no longer funny to you.