Here Be There Dragons

Because heretherebedragons was already taken, in answer to that question. And yes, I did come up with that quote. Impressed? Well then you're easily pleased. Look, a button on the floor over there! That should keep you busy for the next half an hour..

Now, for the rest of you, you may be wondering what this blog is all about. Frankly, so am I. I've debated for a while getting a blog in which to voice my musings, but have refrained for one reason or another, mainly because the majority of my musings end up as poems. See Midnight Poetry. So I've never had much of a need for something like this. However, having made headway in my dissertation research I've realised that there are a lot of questions I'd like to explore, but not within an essay.

And so, Pondermonium is born of the pondermaniac. And to kick start, laughter. A subject dear to my heart and ever difficult to explain.

I shall start with an extract by one of my favourite comedy authors, Bill Bryson, from his book Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe in which he describes an experience at a Parisian bakery.

You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter.

'No, no,' you would say, hands aflutter, 'not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.'

The slug-like creature would stare at you in patient disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which was clearly that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn't want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.

Chances are you laughed at at least part of that, or giggled, chucked, at least allowed a smile to cross your lips. But why? Is it the well structured and descriptive imagery, allowing you picture the pastry seller, the cold stare, the beaver.. or is the repetition of what you would see as the punchline? The words 'dead beaver' are repeated five times in this section. I could make a 'flogging a dead horse/beaver' pun, but I imagine you'd groan at that rather than laugh.

Of course, we also laugh in a similar way at visual comedy, such as this sketch from a small group of lesser-known London comics back in the seventies...

Again we see repetition of a punchline, but this time we have the high-pitched voice edged with anger and disbelief to accompany it as well as audience laughter in the background. Why are they laughing? In fact, my question is why they don't laugh at one of my favourite parts: when Mr Praline picks up the bird cage in the second pet shop after he dropped it in the first. My theory is that since this is a stage setting, the audience will have seen the cage the entire time, whereas in the camera frame it is unseen until Mr Praline picks it up off the floor.

Laughter, and a sense of humour in general, is a strange and wonderful thing. I am interested in what makes us laugh, but as for why we laugh, I doubt an answer really exists.