If they did go to the pool, they had to travel in packs to protect themselves. Even in his predominantly Jewish neighborhood, he was, in his own words, "scrawny. I gave them a reason. I became their jester. Also, they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I'd stick it in their eye. According to My Jewish Learning , Brooks' humor was inspired by feeling marginalized as a Jewish kid in America and the long-suffering history of the Jewish people.
Brooks often felt he couldn't get the girl, because he wasn't tall enough or blonde enough. And when it came to the legacy of Jewish mourning, Brooks wanted to be the one that used laughter over tears. He said, "If your enemy is laughing, how can he bludgeon you to death? According to History Collection , Brooks was anti-war, but he felt determined to fight because he thought the war was "just. Brooks has never considered himself a hero for his time serving, only that it was the right thing to do at the time.
Due to high marks on the Army's intelligence test, Brooks was trained to be an engineer. He often repaired or built bridges, all while being shot at by the enemy. The job included sweeping for mines.
Brooks said, "You take a bayonet, and you look for mines — planted mines. And they could blow a tank, I mean they're big. You find them, unearth them He fought in the Battle of the Bulge , which is considered one of the war's most important battles. Ironically, Mel Brooks joined the Army to fight anti-Semitism but often faced it from his fellow soldiers. Out of my way, out of my face, Jewboy. When asked how one could "get even" with Adolf Hitler he said, "You have to bring him down with ridicule, because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you're just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you're one up on him.
It's been one of my lifelong jobs — to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler. Before Brooks made a career making fun of Hitler, he did his best while serving in the Army. According to Military.
Being a Jewish-American fighter came with an additional risk when getting caught by the enemy. Brooks told a story about his brother Lenny whose plane was hit and had to use his parachute. While falling, Lenny took off his dog tags because they had an "H" for Hebrew on them. Some thought if a Jewish-American soldier was taken, they could get sent to the concentration camps via History Collection.
Mel Brooks got his start in comedy at age 14 by working as a drummer, which led to the decision to change his last name because Kaminsky was too long to fit in writing on the drum.
One night, while playing in the Catskills, he subbed for another comic who had fallen ill. That's why jokes circulate so quickly after a horrific event "Fred West walks into a bar and says, 'Oooh, I could murder some Tennants".
Bad taste keeps us fresh, jerks us out of complacency, sometimes makes us question ourselves. An Asian journalist, sent to see if the late Bernard Manning's act offended him, found himself paralysed with laughter by the line: "I went to a Muslim strip club: it was full of blokes shouting, 'Show us yer face.
Telling Andrew Sachs that you've "enjoyed" his granddaughter on a swing? Please, boys. You're just not trying. ES Money. The Escapist. The Reveller. Children not only run, but skip and do cartwheels. Spinka suggests that in play young animals are testing the limits of their speed, balance, and coordination. In doing so, they learn to cope with unexpected situations such as being chased by a new kind of predator. This account of the value of play in children and young animals does not automatically explain why humor is important to adult humans, but for us as for children and young animals, the play activities that seem the most fun are those in which we exercise our abilities in unusual and extreme ways, yet in a safe setting.
Sports is an example. So is humor. In humor the abilities we exercise in unusual and extreme ways in a safe setting are related to thinking and interacting with other people. What is enjoyed is incongruity, the violation of our mental patterns and expectations.
In joking with friends, for example, we break rules of conversation such as these formulated by H. Grice :. Rule 3 is broken to create humor when we reply to an embarrassing question with an obviously vague or confusing answer. We violate Rule 4 in telling most prepared jokes, as Victor Raskin has shown. A comment or story starts off with an assumed interpretation for a phrase, but then at the punch line, switches to a second, usually opposed interpretation.
They taste a lot like chicken. Humor, like other play, sometimes takes the form of activity that would not be mistaken for serious activity. Wearing a red clown nose and making up nonsense syllables are examples.
More often, however, as in the conversational moves above, humor and play are modeled on serious activities. When in conversation we switch from serious discussion to making funny comments, for example, we keep the same vocabulary and grammar, and our sentences transcribed to paper might look like bona-fide assertions, questions, etc. This similarity between non-serious and serious language and actions calls for ways that participants can distinguish between the two.
The oldest play signals in humans are smiling and laughing. According to ethologists, these evolved from similar play signals in pre-human apes. The apes that evolved into Homo sapiens split off from the apes that evolved into chimpanzees and gorillas about six million years ago. In chimps and gorillas, as in other mammals, play usually takes the form of mock-aggression such as chasing, wrestling, biting, and tickling. According to many ethologists, mock-aggression was the earliest form of play, from which all other play developed Aldis , ; Panksepp , In mock-aggressive play, it is critical that all participants are aware that the activity is not real aggression.
Without a way to distinguish between being chased or bitten playfully and being attacked in earnest, an animal might respond with deadly force.
In the anthropoid apes, play signals are visual and auditory. Jan van Hooff , — and others speculate that the first play signals in humans evolved from two facial displays in an ancestor of both humans and the great apes that are still found in gorillas and chimps. In the other facial display, the lips are relaxed and the mouth open, and breathing is shallow and staccato, like panting.
The relaxed mouth in laughter contrasts with the mouth in real aggression that is tense and prepared to bite hard. As early hominin species began walking upright and the front limbs were no longer used for locomotion, the muscles in the chest no longer had to synchronize breathing with locomotion. The larynx moved to a lower position in the throat, and the pharynx developed, allowing early humans to modulate their breathing and vocalize in complex ways Harris , In the competition for women to mate with, early men may have engaged in humor to show their intelligence, cleverness, adaptability, and desire to please others.
The hypothesis that laughter evolved as a play signal is appealing in several ways. Unlike the Superiority and Incongruity Theories, it explains the link between humor and the facial expression, body language, and sound of laughter.
It also explains why laughter is overwhelmingly a social experience, as those theories do not. According to one estimate, we are thirty times more likely to laugh with other people than when we are alone Provine , Tracing laughter to a play signal in early humans also accords with the fact that young children today laugh during the same activities—chasing, wrestling, and tickling—in which chimps and gorillas show their play face and laugh-like vocalizations.
The idea that laughter and humor evolved from mock-aggression, furthermore, helps explain why so much humor today, especially in males, is playfully aggressive.
The playful aggression found in much humor has been widely misunderstood by philosophers, especially in discussions of the ethics of humor. Starting with Plato, most philosophers have treated humor that represents people in a negative light as if it were real aggression toward those people.
Jokes in which blondes or Poles are extraordinarily stupid, blacks extraordinarily lazy, Italians extraordinarily cowardly, lawyers extraordinarily self-centered, women extraordinarily unmathematical, etc. Philips classifies Polish jokes as racist, for example, but anyone who understands their popularity in the s, knows that they did not involve hostility toward Polish people, who had long been assimilated into North American society.
Consider the joke about the Polish astronaut calling a press conference to announce that he was going to fly a rocket to the sun. This is a fantasy enjoyed for its clever depiction of unbelievable stupidity. While playing with negative stereotypes in jokes does not require endorsement of those stereotypes, however, it still keeps them in circulation, and that can be harmful in a racist or sexist culture where stereotypes support prejudice and injustice.
Jokes can be morally objectionable for perpetuating stereotypes that need to be eliminated. More generally, humor can be morally objectionable when it treats as a subject for play something that should be taken seriously. Morreall , ch. Here humor often blocks compassion and responsible action. From it they produced the record album Concert for Bangladesh.
The album cover featured a photograph of a starving child with a begging bowl. Having sketched an account of humor as play with words and ideas, we need to go further in order to counter the Irrationality Objection, especially since that play is based on violating mental patterns and expectations. What must be added is an explanation of how playfully violating mental patterns and expectations could foster rationality rather than undermine it. Or I could think about embarrassing moments like this as experienced by millions of people over the centuries.
More abstract still would be to think, as the Buddha did, about how human life is full of problems. In the lower animals, mental processing is not abstract but tied to present experience, needs, and opportunities. It is about nearby predators, food, mates, etc. When something violates their expectations, especially something involving a potential or actual loss, their typical reaction is fear, anger, disgust, or sadness.
These emotions evolved in mammals and were useful for millions of years because they motivate adaptive behavior such as fighting, fleeing, avoiding noxious substances, withdrawing from activity, and avoiding similar situations in the future. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness are still sometimes adaptive in humans: A snarling dog scares us, for example, and we move away quickly, avoiding a nasty bite.
We scream and poke the eyes of a mugger, and he runs off. What early humans needed was a way to react to the violation of their expectations that transcended their immediate experience and their individual perspective.
Humorous amusement provided that. In the humorous frame of mind, we experience, think about, or even create something that violates our understanding of how things are supposed to be. But we suspend the personal, practical concerns that lead to negative emotions, and enjoy the oddness of what is occurring.
If the incongruous situation is our own failure or mistake, we view it in the way we view the failures and mistakes of other people. This perspective is more abstract, objective, and rational than an emotional perspective. In laughter, as Wallace Chafe said in The Importance of Not Being Earnest , not only do we not do anything, but we are disabled as we lose muscle control in our torsos, arms, and legs.
In extremely heavy laughter, we fall on the floor and wet our pants. The nonpractical attitude in humor would not be beneficial, of course, if I were in imminent danger. When immediate action is called for, humor is no substitute.
But in many situations where our expectations are violated, no action would help. One of us has to go. In fear and anger, chemicals such as epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol are released into the blood, causing an increase in muscle tension, heart rate, and blood pressure, and a suppression of the immune system. Those physiological changes evolved in earlier mammals as a way to energize them to fight or flee, and in early humans, they were usually responses to physical dangers such as predators or enemies.
Today, however, our bodies and brains react in the same way to problems that are not physically threatening, such as overbearing bosses and work deadlines. The increased muscle tension, the spike in blood pressure, and other changes in stress not only do not help us with such problems, but cause new ones such as headaches, heart attacks, and cancer.
When in potentially stressful situations we shift to the play mode of humor, our heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension decrease, as do levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. Laughter also increases pain tolerance and boosts the activity of the immune system, which stress suppresses Morreall , ch.
It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us. While there is only speculation about how humor developed in early humans, we know that by the late 6 th century BCE the Greeks had institutionalized it in the ritual known as comedy, and that it was performed with a contrasting dramatic form known as tragedy.
Both were based on the violation of mental patterns and expectations, and in both the world is a tangle of conflicting systems where humans live in the shadow of failure, folly, and death. Like tragedy, comedy represents life as full of tension, danger, and struggle, with success or failure often depending on chance factors.
Identifying with these characters, audiences at comedies and tragedies have contrasting responses to events in the dramas. And because these responses carry over to similar situations in life, comedy and tragedy embody contrasting responses to the incongruities in life.
Along with epic, it is part of the Western heroic tradition that extols ideals, the willingness to fight for them, and honor. The tragic ethos is linked to patriarchy and militarism—many of its heroes are kings and conquerors—and it valorizes what Conrad Hyers calls Warrior Virtues—blind obedience, the willingness to kill or die on command, unquestioning loyalty, single-mindedness, resoluteness of purpose, and pride. Its own methods of handling conflict include deal-making, trickery, getting an enemy drunk, and running away.
In place of Warrior Virtues, it extols critical thinking, cleverness, adaptability, and an appreciation of physical pleasures like eating, drinking, and sex. Along with the idealism of tragedy goes elitism.
The people who matter are kings, queens, and generals. In comedy there are more characters and more kinds of characters, women are more prominent, and many protagonists come from lower classes. Everybody counts for one. That shows in the language of comedy, which, unlike the elevated language of tragedy, is common speech.
The basic unit in tragedy is the individual, in comedy it is the family, group of friends, or bunch of co-workers. While tragic heroes are emotionally engaged with their problems, comic protagonists show emotional disengagement. They think, rather than feel, their way through difficulties. By presenting such characters as role models, comedy has implicitly valorized the benefits of humor that are now being empirically verified, such as that it is psychologically and physically healthy, it fosters mental flexibility, and it serves as a social lubricant.
With a few exceptions like Aquinas, philosophers have ignored these benefits. If philosophers wanted to undo the traditional prejudices against humor, they might consider the affinities between one contemporary genre of comedy—standup comedy—and philosophy itself. There are at least seven. First, standup comedy and philosophy are conversational: like the dialogue format that started with Plato, standup routines are interactive.
Second, both reflect on familiar experiences, especially puzzling ones. We wake from a vivid dream, for example, not sure what has happened and what is happening. Third, like philosophers, standup comics often approach puzzling experiences with questions. They ask whether familiar ideas make sense, and they refuse to defer to authority and tradition. It was for his critical thinking that Socrates was executed.
So were cabaret comics in Germany who mocked the Third Reich. Sixth, in thinking critically, philosophers and standup comics pay careful attention to language. Attacking sloppy and illogical uses of words is standard in both, and so is finding exactly the right words to express an idea.
Seventh, the pleasure of standup comedy is often like the pleasure of doing philosophy. In both we relish new ways of looking at things and delight in surprising thoughts.
Cleverness is prized. One recent philosopher attuned to the affinity between comedy and philosophy was Bertrand Russell. Often writing for popular audiences, Russell had many quips that would fit nicely into a comedy routine:.
For more examples of the affinities between comedy and philosophy, there is a series of books on philosophy and popular culture from Open Court Publishing that includes: Seinfeld and Philosophy , The Simpsons and Philosophy , Woody Allen and Philosophy , and Monty Python and Philosophy In philosophy of mind, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams have used humor to explain the development of the human mind.
Kangaroo is said to taste like wild, gamey steak. The director Micheal Bay has said that the "door comedy" such as the twins and other comedy will not be in it. Walt Kelly was a cartoonist who wrote "Pogo".
Pogo paraphrased Commodore Perry's famous quote from the war of , " Oliver Perry. Pogo Possum. Log in. English Language. Study now. See Answer. Best Answer. Mel Brooks Jack Benny 's is often credited with that quote - but he wasnt the first. Study guides. Prefixes Suffixes and Root Words 20 cards. What beginning with the letter A is the meaning of the prefix 'circum'. Adding the suffix -able to a root word forms which part of speech. Which of these definitions describes characterization. What is a literary point of view.
Parts of Speech 21 cards. How is a speech least like an essay. What challenge did Roosevelt face in presenting his Four Freedoms speech to his audience.
Which example of nonverbal communication does Al Gore use in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
0コメント