A sense of humor is an important thing to have. I think people often underestimate the importance and functionality of humor – we think of humor as being the engine that powers jokes, that makes us laugh, that entertains and amuses, but it’s more than that – humor, like science, is a way of approaching reality and, like science, can yield exciting discoveries.
Humor is the part of our brain that gets tickled when an unexpected connection gets made. One word sounds like another word, suggesting an amusing mental image, or an event suggests an absurd precipitating cause, or someone reacts in a way that is bizarre and unique to them – and we laugh. Telling a joke is the process of creating and mapping one of these unlikely connections, and hopefully, if it’s well executed, you map it will enough that people will follow, and they will laugh with you.
That’s the fun and games portion. However, the same process plays out in many different ways – one word suggests another word, a reference, sends you off on a tangent, and all of a sudden you have a new idea for a story, an invention, a discovery. That process, of finding an unexpected connection and introducing another person to it in a way that encourages them to make a delightful discovery, is the basic skill of education and rhetoric. The ability to see humor is the ability to see more than is there, to see tenuous connections and to explore them.
I suppose humor is really just one way of connecting weird unrelated ideas. We do it in lots of ways, though most of them are also pretty humorous. Sexual fetishes, for example, are also a way we connect disparate concepts, connect arousal with sensations of sight and sound and smell that have no direct sexual connotation, but have accrued sexual symbolic potency through personal past experience. Sometimes our sense of what’s interesting become remarkably narrow: Some folks only get off to shoes, some folks just endlessly quote Monty Python. Same thing, basically.
For more artistic pursuits, the terms we usually use for this kind of humor is ‘symbolism’, so these jokes are more like cosmic jokes which are generally at our expense. Connections are made between elements of the story, references to other stories, tidbits of history and life, stewed together, and left for us to discover. Of course, we discover weird connections and references and inferences whether they were intentionally placed there for us or not, because us readers we have our own sense of humor as well. Sometime the joke is on the author.
A lot of these jokes, perhaps, aren’t very funny. Still, the ideas they lead us towards, the punchlines they guide us to, those are the payoff of a story, of an idea, of an education. When you map across an endless sea of incidents, you can’t help but start seeing coincidences – and every coincidence suggests a story, suggests a meaning, hints at a possible future.