This past Sunday night,
my housemate Rachel and I stayed up late watching a quaint made-for-TV mystery
movie series instead of completing the various readings we each had to do. We
were so deep in procrastination, it seemed, that we were actively doing
something we really didn’t want to do
instead. The heroine’s name was Aurora Teagarden, if that gives any indication.
(There is no word that can aptly describe the experience of watching a Hallmark
Movies and Mysteries “Aurora Teagarden” adaptation at midnight—no word that can
encompass the experience of watching a spunky, blonde librarian somehow
outsmart the entire police force of her town, solve murders where the body is
never actually shown, and interact
with her sorta-boyfriend as though she were not, in fact, a grown
thirty-something woman, but instead a middleschooler with a crush. All set to a
bizarrely inappropriate light-hearted soundtrack. Yet we watched on.)
We were on the second
Aurora Teagarden mystery when what I can only call delirium set in. Some background is necessary, though; during the
snow day the previous Tuesday, the same friend and I had spent the day off
having an extended movie night. I chose my favorite ridiculous high school-summer
blockbuster (Pacific Rim), our other
friend chose the bizarre 2008 Wachowski siblings’ Speed Racer, and Rachel chose Fifty
Shades Darker. (The fact that it was the clean cut of the last one only added
to the experience, as did the fact that the stream had obviously been filmed in
a movie theater and people in the audience kept standing up and blocking the
screen.)
But the delirium. The
movies were all fresh in our minds, which may explain it, as may madness
brought on by over-exposure to Ms. Teagarden’s twee charms, or simply being
over-tired, but somehow we ended up spending the next two hours photoshopping
lines of poetry over screenshots of Speed
Racer and Fifty Shades via a “Meme
Generator” and laughing until we couldn’t breathe. The results are, objectively,
not funny to anyone but the two of us. Examples follow:
It
wasn’t until I had begun to edit Byron over a screencap of Charlie Day’s
character mind-melding with a giant alien in Pacific Rim, and Rachel continued our Ginsberg trend but now over the
plucky Aurora Teagarden, that she stopped, looked at me, and said “This is
would be totally incomprehensible to anyone but us. It’s like a secret spy
code.” I’d spent most of my childhood wanting to be a spy, and now I was
finally getting my wish granted through lines of verse and Jamie Dornan’s
brooding looks into the distance. It was poetic.
But the
code part is not the part that struck me; it was what she said about our bad
edits being incomprehensible to literally anyone else. She was right. They were
incredibly niche; absurd. Not only was it necessary to have seen the movies,
but it was also necessary to have seen them enough to associate feelings with
the certain scenes that could then be
summarized in lines of famous poetry. (And recognition of the poetry itself was
also required for the full experience.) In short, it was a standard “inside
joke” experience.
It
got me thinking about humor on the larger scale, particularly the kind we’ve
been discussing in class lately. When we read the Sedaris essays, we talked a
lot about relatability and the need
to have some sort of emotional understanding of the situation in order to find
it truly funny. The same could be
said for Don’t Make a Black Woman Take
Off Her Earrings; at times “Madea” commented on how you needed be black to
fully understand what she was talking about (and if you weren’t, to go ask one
of your black friends). I don’t presume to inflate a mutual fascination with a
movie to the scale of actual life experiences, of course, but there is the same
underlying idea throughout: you must have a basic understanding, if not a basic
relationship, with the stuff that makes up the humor.
I
think the same could be said for a lot of the humor in Eat, Pray, Love as well. As a sophomore in college, I haven’t gone
through nearly as much as Gilbert has. I haven’t been married for eight years
and subsequently gone through a bitter divorce, been a published author, been
outside the country, or lived in New York City. I’m also nineteen as opposed to
her mid-thirties status in the memoir. There are some aspects of Eat, Pray, Love, I feel, that require
this shared understanding in order to be funny. For example—I couldn’t fully
grasp the homesickness that Gilbert discussed in regard to NYC while she was
abroad, nor her helplessness and ennui when she felt trapped in her marriage
and the expectations for her to have a baby. Gilbert discussed, and ultimately
joked, about both, and they both seemed like occasions in which an experience
of the situation (or a similar one) was necessary to fully understand. However—on the other hand, so much of what Gilbert
talked about was universally relatable.
While what is most likely a very small portion of us have traveled to India to
find a solution for it, nearly everyone has
struggled with finding peace with themselves. Nearly everyone has struggled
with loneliness, or depression, or heartbreak; nearly everyone has struggled
with the nature, or existence, of a higher power. It’s the emotional experiences Gilbert describes with a humorous tone, not
necessarily the physical ones, which can make the book relatable. It’s a shared
understanding.
So it
is like an inside joke, in that sense. Things can, of course, still be funny even
if you don’t necessarily understand or relate to every single aspect behind it.
I’ve never meditated or been to the Ashram, but Gilbert’s humorous description
of her struggle with this experience still made me laugh occasionally; I’m not
black, but I still thought that Don’t
Make A Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings was funny; likewise, you don’t
have to watch Speed Racer to realize
that there’s something inherently absurd in applying works of literary merit to
it. You can still recognize the humor in something even if it doesn’t directly
appeal to some physical or emotional experience you’ve had, or an aspect of
your identity—but it certainly adds to the experience of the humor if you do.
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