A-to-Z Challenge 2014 - Amusement

(Warning: Containts Adult Language)

I participated in this challenge last year on the spur of the moment and had a great time. I didn't exactly have a theme and although I have one this year, it is broad in scope; I picked “HUMOR AND HUMORISTS” because I am a “pantser” in that I write by the seat of my pants, seldom edit, and just go with whatever comes into my head. This can be terrific if one has a good grasp of vocabulary and sentence structure and can write essays or mediocre short stories fairly quickly. It sucks when you write novels; believe me. I am the voice of experience in this. I have a great novel on paper and a great novel running around in my head; however, they are not the same book. I just haven't worked up the gumption to sit my happy ass down in my writing chair and put them together. I've been too busy lolling about in my gaming chair, which is the same chair, by the way, as my writing chair, playing Runescape and giving people hell, who deserve having hell given them, to do any editing, but that is neither here nor there and has nothing whatsoever to do with humor, but is one HELL of a run-on sentence, which should be avoided at all costs, which if I were teaching English grammar, I would admonish my students to avoid. But, I digress. Still. Damn! My mother, the English teacher would have been proud of the above , right there!

Just what does make us amused? By amused, I mean of course, what makes us laugh and tickles our funny bones? I think it is fair to say that a sense of humor is almost as personal as a person's concept of what faith they follow or why they vote a certain way. There is no general formula for a sure-fire laugh-getter and I find, at least in my case, the more obvious the joke, the more stale and failed the attempt becomes.

                                                                                                    courtesy: blog.pavelife.com

I think, that certain forces come into play when it comes to things that make us laugh. Universality for one. One of the reasons people like a comedian like Bill Cosby, or Jim Gaffigan are funny, although they are completely different is that we can relate to them. Bill Cosby used to do stand-up about his childhood and it resonated with every kid I knew growing up in the 60s. Jim Gaffigan and his absurdities with “Hot Pockets” is just as funny, because it is absurd, just in his voicing of it. 

                                                                                               courtesy: thrillist.com                                                                          

Some people are just bowled over by physical comedy, which more sophisticated comedians in the 30s, 40s and 50s dismissed as low-brow, but I defy anyone to not laugh at the stupidities presented on America's Home Videos. I will also sit down and watch the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, who are screamingly funny, to this day, and the physical comedy of Chevy Chase, particularly his “Fletch” series. Woody Allen's earliest movies combined sophisticated angst, Freudian dread with slapstick in a way that has never been paralleled.

courtesy: clclt.com

"Love and Death" by Woody Allen is a great movie and a huge joke on Russian Literature; from Pushkin to Gogol to Chekhov, no one got out of this movie unscathed! This is a reference to Dostoyoevsky's "The Idiot"

But what of more sophisticated comedians and humorists? George Carlin was probably the best of those, as profane as he could be. He was also taught by Jesuits, as was Bill Maher and myself; I have found that anyone with any kind of Jesuitical background, (maybe it's something in the rarefied atmosphere) leaves us with a playfulness for the language, which does take a certain flair to appreciate. Be that as it may, I appreciate a good pun, which as my long-suffering mother used to say to my father whenever he came up with some tin-eared horror, “Glenn Wallace, enough pun-ishment!” And so it goes.

Randomness and random anything cracks me up. Stuff that just pops up out of the blue will have me on the floor rolling around, holding my sides in a red-hot minute. When I was homeless, I had two roommates, and one had already gone to bed, and I was already in bed. The third was getting ready for bed, and I heard her say, “Okay, I'm going to eat this turkey now, and go to sleep!” I laughed like a hyena for 15 minutes. She finally walked into my little cubby-hole to find out what was so funny. I wiped the tears from my eyes. “You're eating a turkey? At 11 o'clock at night?” She looked at me and snorted. “A cookie, you asshole.” Off I went again. “I liked it the other way.”

Amusement is to be found in stunts in movies. I love Jackie Chan movies. I have never seen such well-timed or closely-executed stunts in moves, save “A Fish Called Wanda,” with people disappearing in the nick of time, behind doors, into closets underneath sinks, all while the unsuspecting person is kept completely in the dark as to their presence! It's a marvel to behold, while you're laughing at the ridiculousness of the whole preposterous plot.

With Owen Wilson as some kind of Zen-Surfer-Cowboy. Can't miss.

The last are the authors and writers that have amused me, past and present. I have admired Robert Brockway at Cracked.com for years and we have struck up some sort of passing-back-and-forth-of-Tweets-and-snarky-notes-thing,-that-doesn't-really-qualify-as-a-friendship,-but-more-of-an-awareness-of-one- another-thing. I will be honoring him with a post on my letter “B” whether he likes it or not. I haven't told him yet, because, as per usual, I didn't get around to it. I am sure he won't mind. I think. He is one HELL of a writer and a very funny man and I truly, truly respect him and his craft! Have a great and fun, A-to-Z challenge, 2014 everyone!

THE GREAT THEME REVEAL FOR THE A-TO-Z BLOG CHALLENGE 2014

I had to think about this whole theme thing, long and hard. You see, last year, I jumped into this challenge at the last minute, kind of like the way I jumped into NaNoWriMo in 2012. A-to-Z, 2013 turned out spectacularly for me, in that I actually finished the damned thing! I did not finish NaNoWriMo in 2012, but quit a mere 1637 words into it, because at the time I was trying to cope with severe and untreated symptoms of Parkinsonism, or essential tremor, – another movement disorder that is closely related to Parkinson's Disease – which was making my life an unmitigated hell. I was still sans treatment at the time of the A-to-Z challenge, but was undergoing testing, after finding this neat-o neurologist at the Parkinson's Center of Excellence on the campus of USF. It's been an arduous journey and is not yet done, but I'm digressing, and I want to remain on point. Suffice it to say, I am being treated and it helps; it's not a cure, but I'm feeling much better and the tremors and pain and all the other assorted psychological aspects of the disease have abated. I'm still crazier than hell, but I know what to do about it.

I finished last year, by dint of keeping my posts short and snappy and just having fun with reading others' posts and commenting. When the most awesome Damyanti announced that she was co-hosting again this year and looking for assistants, I jumped on board. Damyanti has been a magnificent presence at the A-to-Z challenge that was started by our own Arlee Bird, several years ago. As I have become a larger presence in the blogging world, I find myself becoming part of a larger community that spans the globe and that, all by itself, is pretty terrific!

It also didn't hurt that I actually finished NaNoWriMo 2013 this year and have a manuscript, albeit, an unpolished one to show for my efforts. But that's a story for another day. This is not about the other blogging communities (shout out to IWSG, ROW80 and Blog Blitz!) but our A-to-Z Challenge; 26 letters of the alphabet in 26 days! A post for each letter, every day, with the exceptions of Sundays, during the month of April.

So, without further ado, and since I am on the team that is responsible for the assistance and creation of “themes” for people who are having issues with letters (“Q”, “X”, and “Z” are the usual culprits) I will reveal my theme: HUMOR AND HUMORISTS.

Yep, it came to me yesterday, while I was sitting in the ER waiting room for about the eleventy-billionth time – please name your next wing after me, TGH – with another stupid eye problem, that HUMOR AND HUMORISTS is the perfect theme for me!

I've got to be the only person in the world (well, maybe not the only one) that is legally blind, and has Parkinsonism so severe, that at times, when I make a taco salad, it looks like a piñata exploded in the kitchen. I have no depth perception, so everything is the same size. A mouse the size of a canoe ran through my bedroom, recently, where my computers are, and I almost jumped into the closet. When JC wanted to know what in Sam Hill was going on, I told him I was practicing the dance steps for “What Does the Fox Say?” So he bought me a Leopard Hat and Shirt at the Dollar Store and now I'm gonna have to learn the damned thing. “Ring-ding-ding-ding-a-ding-ding-ding!”

But at least I'm not the only person in this house that does stupid stuff. During the Olympics, we were looking at the news, and the sports announcer in Sochi, Russia for no discernible reason, helpfully mentioned that there was snow in every state of the United States, except Florida. We were watching some Olympics; ice-skating, where every routine was skated to Tchaikovsky, blaringly and hollowly, with echoes that lasted for eons, so that the music became just a huge A-minor smear. The only way I knew the piece was over, was when the people on the ice were no longer twirling, or falling down.

Then, we watched some more Olympics. Curling, with the Norwegians and their pants; all looking like someone was on one hell of a bad acid trip during the designing, or else the athletes raided their grandmothers' quilting bins and did a one-off. They were sporting colors that don't exist in nature, or at least on this planet. Ten minutes of this and I'm thinking that cleaning the house isn't such a bad idea.

Cut to the local news. The sports comes on; thank God the Norwegians and their Dayglo pants aren't part of this broadcast. JC pipes up, “I hear that there's snow in every state except Florida.” I look over at Alex, and we both just lose it. JC listens to us howl and yawp like hyenas for a few minutes and then asks what is so funny. We tell him, “We were here when the guy said there is snow in every state except Florida!” And off we went again. JC makes it worse when he says, “I didn't hear that!” Oh. Jesus. Stop. Now. Now. Because, I'm in the Red Zone of Laughter; the kind of laughing where you may have apoplexy and get a hernia. JC is hard of hearing and he finally catches on and gets into the moment and he has that sort of hearty laughter that makes you laugh, even if you don't know what in the hell is going on.

Laughing is good for the soul and is certainly good for the body; it helps to release endorphins and they are good for nerve endings. I make it a rule to laugh as much as possible, but kindly. Never cruelly, or at the expense of someone else. God has given us the capacity to do many things and there is no injunction against humor and laughter in any religion or faith, culture or nationality that I know of.

Some of my posts will be on funny topics; some will be on funny writers, present and past. Last year, I started out this challenge with an honest-to-God spreadsheet with all of the letters A, B, C, and so on, with the topics listed. I think I had this half-assed notion that I was going to fill it out and hand it in to Arlee Bird for a grade at the end of the challenge, or something. I had a topic picked for each letter, but that went out the window the second day of the challenge, when I wrote about Beethoven and his 3^rd Symphony, instead of Bravery. I'm glad I did so. I may have a theme picked out, but I have no earthly clue what I'm going to do for the letter “A”, but I've got a few days to think about it. It'll come to me.