Lesson
53
Why
humorists mix facts and fancy
My mind will forever
associate orgasms with humour, thanks to Black
Tie and Tales, the 2000 Leacock Medal book by Arthur Black. In this, his
second medal winner, Black quotes a number of authors and shares many
observations on humour.
But the remark that “laughter is an
orgasm triggered by the intercourse of reason and unreason" lingers. It haunts me, not only because of the image, but because Black’s
entire book, directly or indirectly, argues for this concept.
In his earlier medal-winning book,
Black, a confessed “Idea Thief,” showed how odd information can stimulate
thinking and ranting. Black Tie
collects and presents more of the same, but it takes readers a step further
with musings on how interactions between the unreasonable and the rational can
make us laugh.
These interactions also, according to
Black and those he quotes, bring us closer to the truth.
In the 1990s, when Black generated
many of the essays in this book, literary critics were still picking at the
merits of creative non-fiction--a mix of facts and fancy--and a lot of the
debris fell on Leacock Medallist Farley Mowat. Arthur Black, a fan of the
format, defends Mowat with the environmentalist and author’s own words: “Truth
I have no trouble with. It’s the facts I get mixed up." Black amplifies the point with Saskatchewan writer Sharon Butala’s explanation
of how all good “nonfiction is fiction” anyway. Butala suggests that in “the
backward search through happenstance, trivia, the flotsam and jetsam of life,
to search out a pattern, themes, a meaning . . . is by its nature an imposition
of order onto what was chaotic . . . what is [really] true are thoughts,
dreams, visions."
The idea of mapping thought onto the
flotsam of life appeals to Arthur Black. Even though he recognizes the power
that trivia tidbits have to engage (“Any storyteller knows that the first thing
you’ve got to get from an audience is attention”), his best rants merge trivia
with thoughts to grasp at a truth.
So if “truth lies at the root of much
humour" and humour arises from the incongruities of life, truths that make us laugh may
be those revealed by thoughts in conflict with fact. It seems to me that such
incongruity can only be achieved in one of two ways: (1) with humorous thought
spread upon dull facts; or (2) with sound thinking in the face of unreasonable
fact. Black’s curmudgeon persona prefers the latter--the one that rails at
reality.
To this end, he seeks stimulus from
everywhere he can, using a brain that operates on “the same principle as the
lint mitt. It picks up fluff, dust, stray hairs like a magnet . . . and lets
the big stuff slide right on by.”
Arthur Black uses the fluff for
orientation and a hint at what is coming. He links his own experience to broad
issues and ties trivia to his feelings. The death of his aunt leads into an
essay on gift-giving. The story of a biologist in the Brazilian rain forest
revives memories of Black’s father. His experience wrestling with a tangle of
battery cables sends him into a study of neuro-functioning.
Arthur Black would chuckle at all this
seriousness around the subject of humour. It is in this book that he cautions,
“Trying to define exactly what is funny is like trying to braid a rope out of
smoke.” Still, I am convinced by the suggestion that the intercourse between
the odd and the thoughtful can reveal a truth and make us laugh.
Not all truths fit this frame, though.
Too bad. It would be a different world if truth-telling always induced an
orgasm.
Writing Exercise
Identify a belief
that you hold dearly and write a convincing essay to argue for your position--but
fill the essay with many obvious factual errors.