"I’ve done work with the University of Michigan that tracks eye movement as people look at cartoons. The interesting thing is..."

"... that at that 'get it' moment, when someone understands, the pupil sort of pops like it does for a flashbulb," says Robert Mankoff, the New Yorker cartoon editor.

I also collaborated on research in which we used The New Yorker cartoon caption contest. One of the ideas about humor is that it’s our way of coping with negative feelings. In a control study we found people who were primed with negative emotions, through images of illness and death at a subliminal level, create more and funnier captions than those who were not.

I'm interested in this connection between negative emotions and humor skill, but I hate the New Yorker caption contests so much. I should process my negativity into a funnier closing line for this blog post.

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"This house can’t believe you’re scrolling through the TV channels one by one instead of just using the damn page button."

#6 on a list of "23 Bitchy Looking Houses That Can’t Believe You Right Now."

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"Mort Sahl is the guy who inspired me to go on stage for the first time in my life, and when I saw him the other night..."

"... I had that feeling again of, 'I can do this,'" said Woody Allen, contemplating doing standup again.

“He was as great as I remembered... So I thought, ‘Gee, it would be nice to get up there and do that again.’... It’s a lot of work....You have to put together an hour of laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. You can’t dawdle. In a film script, if there’s a laugh here and there, but people interacting in a meaningful way, it’s good. But on stage, you come out and you’ve got to get a laugh, and then another and another.”

Allen is 78. Can you picture him doing standup now? Did you picture Mort Sahl? I didn't know Mort Sahl was still alive. He's 86. Here he is in 1967, opening with a shot at that actor who wants to be Governor of California and proceeding to explain, using a blackboard, the difference between left, right, and middle (which includes a left, right, and middle, to the left, right, and middle, respectively):

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"I'm trying my best not to be cynical, but: Is subtracting context par for the course for NYT editorialists?"

"In this case it was almost as if the columnist was so eager to seize upon the Godwin's reference that she failed to even attempt to comprehend why Scalia said what he did, and instead relied on knee-jerk preconceptions to inform her judgement. If that's not the epitome of bias there, I don't know what is."

A comment, at an Instapundit post about my supplying the NYT with the context it missed. But I only had the context because when I wrote about the NYT piece, someone who was at the conference emailed me with a detailed account. That information wanted to be heard, and somehow I was the portal for it. I think the NYT had to be actively looking for crap to throw at Scalia and keeping its door shut to the flow of information. And I think my blogging the context only resulted in a correction because it was picked up by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, and that got the NYT's attention, but initially only to try to shrug off the problem:

@jamestaranto @joshtpm What's the correction? Joking about Godwin's Law?
— Juliet Lapidos (@julietlapidos) July 24, 2013

Only joking. Ha ha. Get it. Joking about the Holocaust. Heh heh. What's the problem?

Taranto kept up the pressure: "Ahhh, I did not realize your post was comedy!" And the NYT thought better of its don't-you-get-the-Holocaust-jokes stance and put up the correction.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall, the other target of Taranto's tweet, stood his ground: "Again, anything in the Althouse post that in any way contradicts my post? Or are you just trolling?" And: "Hey Jim, You might want to read what I actually wrote since nothing in that post contradicts it." That is: So what if I left out the context as long as I didn't have any incorrect statements?

Context is a funny topic. Remember when Andrew Breitbart was pilloried for quoting Shirley Sherrod out of context?

Context itself must be understood in context. If your rules about putting quotes in context depend on whether you're quoting people you like or people you hate, then you are a hack. I think both Marshall and Lapidos showed themselves to be hacks here, but at least Lapidos or the organization that controls her is ashamed when exposed and tries to cover its tracks. Marshall is out and proud.

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A song for lawn boy.

Yesterday's post showing Lawnmaster Meade deploying the reel mower prompts a reader to send a link to this song by Otis Lee Crenshaw.

Well, ladies and gentlemen you know we all miss Elvis, you know we do deep inside, and all the other musicians like Hank and Janis and Jimmy and . . . for every musician who passed on up to heaven, generally due to poor physical maintenance there's another musician whose died and gone to heaven due to lawn and garden accidents. That's right. Quite a handful of them actually, like the drummer for Toto, God how we miss him. Jeff Porcaro was his name, who died just spraying weeds in his own backyard. Or Merle Watson, the great bluegrass guitarist who passed away in a similar agriculture related accident. Nobody's ever gonna write a song about these gentlemen so we thought we would. This is for all the men who fought the lawn . . . and the lawn won....

(Full text of lyrics here.)

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"Why Men Need Women" — the headline to an article about "Why Women Are Good At Getting Men To Give Away Their Stuff."

Instapundit finds a choice example of "the Althouse rule." Here's the underlying article, "Why Men Need Women," which reports a study that finds that "The mere presence of female family members — even infants — can be enough to nudge men in the generous direction."

Instapundit notes that this is the kind of finding that could rankle feminists, who should resist the idea that society's purpose for women is to tame men and structure their otherwise destructive energy for the good of the group.

Fortunately, though, this political incorrectness is offset, as the piece by Adam Grant adheres slavishly to the Althouse Rule on writing about gender, which is that you can report anything so long as you do so in a way that portrays women as superior.

Here's my post from 2005 stating the rule and demonstrating its application in the context of a study about the response to cartoons, which was reported under the headline, "Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny." "That's not funny" is a punchline for jokes about humorless women, but somehow the reporter of the study transformed the old deficiency into an asset.

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Does anyone in the Bible ever say "hello"?

It's all translation, if it's in English, and "hello" is a pretty recent English word. (The OED puts its earliest use in the year 1827.) I spent some time with the various translations at BibleGateway, and I found at least one that has "hello" — the Contemporary English Version, within which "hello" appears exactly twice:

Job 17:14 Then I could greet the grave as my father and say to the worms, “Hello, mother and sisters!”

Matthew 26:49 Judas walked right up to Jesus and said, “Hello, teacher.” Then Judas kissed him.

Great material! Job and Judas come across as a couple of darkly edgy comedians.

Why was I looking for "hello" in the Bible? I got caught up — after writing this post — in the meaning of "hail" in "Hail Mary." I was puzzling over whether or not there should be a comma between "hail" and "Mary," which I was reading to mean basically "Hello, Mary." But the Contemporary English Version of the Bible doesn't use "Hello, Mary" in the relevant verse (which is Luke 1:28). (It has: "The angel greeted Mary and said, 'You are truly blessed! The Lord is with you.'")

A common alternative word for "hail" in that verse is "rejoice." I'm also seeing "Greetings!" which seems pretty close to Hello. I thought about other uses of "hail." Meade — who grew up in West Lafayette, home of Purdue — brought up "Hail Purdue." That made me, an alumna of the University of Michigan, think of "Hail! to the victors valiant." And then there's "Hail to the Chief" and "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" (beginning Shelley's "To a Skylark").

What does "hail" mean beyond "hello"?

"Heil Hitler" is translated as "Hail Hitler." It's not "Hello Hitler," which seems edgily absurd. You could sing it to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," which has a comma, I might note, unlike Hello Kitty.

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"Brevity is a big factor for me in a stand-alone joke. To get a laugh with the fewest number of words possible."

"Which is why 'Take my wife, please' is such a great joke. The closest I’ve ever come is probably 'The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.'"

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Boring! I don't have time for this. Can't we just montage it?

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"Nobody wants to wear pants... but it's just the way the world works... so..."

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Phallic symbol of the day.

Oh, come on now. And this is under a headline containing a double-entendre word: "Hedge Funds Are for Suckers."



Thanks to the reader who sent me that link, with the comment: "That graphic is pretty interesting. It’s a male world in finance I guess and can’t help but wonder what a female comparable graph might elicit in the way of comments."

ADDED: What would the female image even be? Quite aside from the challenge of making the person look like someone involved in hedge funds, you'd need a deliberately sexual presentation. But I think the reader — referring to what the comments would be — means to refer to the way various media pundits would be critical if they saw a female ludicrously sexualized as a way to say something about money. And I take this to be sounding the old "war on men" theme. Why can you make fun of men and not women?



The answer, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's more acceptable to make fun of whoever is powerful and dominant — the rich and not the poor, the gloriously healthy and not the sick, white people and not black people. Alternatively, we could just never have fun with anything. Or we could be scrupulously equal in how we dish it out. But inhibition isn't too good for comedy. So what we do is: We have a lot of easy targets — the rich, the men, the white people — and then we have the more difficult topics that create a place for especially capable comedians to be edgy.

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