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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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Wet or Dry, Hot or Cold:
A Climatological Study of the Funny Compass™
(That Could Save America?)
Brooke Champagne
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Standing in the slow security line at Fresno Yosemite International Airport, just past the lobby’s multi-million-dollar artificial sequoias composed of hand-sculpted tree bark, the couple in front of me searches for something interesting to talk about. The woman’s curls shutter tightly against her head, but spring into action with an idea that will make her husband laugh (or chortle, or whatever Republicans do): “You know Tricia’s in-laws? They’re so upset about the election that they bought Trump toilet paper. His face is on every sheet, in every bathroom. How pathetic.” Her husband dutifully laugh-chortles.
I agree it’s pathetic to buy a product that forces you to more frequently see the face of someone you loathe, particularly during vulnerable bowel moments. And while I’m not a fan of the couple in the security line, Tricia’s in-laws sound equally insufferable. How far can you commit to a bit like that, wiping your ass…with a face? But I sort of got where they were coming from, since my favorite present of the 2016 holiday season was the one gifted by our babysitter: an orange-hair-bristled Trump toilet brush. Though, did I sincerely laugh while using his head to scrub our toilets in early 2017? I did not. Who needed another reminder we were living in bread-and-circus times, that the man’s iconography—and by extension, his warped philosophy for governing and living—was so omnipresent, I couldn’t even escape it on the shitter? I figured this out eight years ago. Why were Tricia’s in-laws so slow on the uptake?
Mid-morning on that travel day, during a long layover in Vegas, I munch on eight-dollar peanut-butter-chocolate “energy balls,” and take a picture of the last two to show my five-year-old son. “Those look like my balls!” I imagine he’ll say. After three days away for a writer’s event, I hope to elicit his laughter immediately when I return home. If he doesn’t bring up the balls resemblance, I will. (In fairness, his kindergarten class is learning shapes, and one handout prompts us to search for spherical comparisons out in the world). But the truth is, potty and body humor are part of our love language.
My ball musing is interrupted, rudely, by a large man holding a 10 a.m. whiskey and wearing a spiked hair hat. Between sips he points his finger at an airport attendant who’s asked him to please back away from the slot machines unless he plans to play.
“How the hell y’all got slots everywhere and, what, we’re not supposed to look?!” The tiny female attendant apologizes for enforcing rules. I drop my balls, surveying this unsettling scene, and the man sees me looking. I’m instantly relieved that rather than yelling at me, too, he tries soliciting my sympathy. “Um, ma’am, that chair you’re sitting in. Those chairs are not for sitting. You’re supposed to stand alongside them. They’re not for your use. Those are non-usable chairs.” Oh good, sarcasm. I perform a knowing nod, offer a limp thumbs up, then go back to staring at my balls. What an asshole, I think. Trump voter. Bully.
“What an asshole,” says the man next to me wearing blue suede Pumas—I’ve committed to never looking up again—talking to his friend. “That lady was just doing her job, what the fuck.” Ah, I think, there are still gentlemen in this world, he’s on my side, all hope is not lost. Then after a beat, “Probably votes Democrat.” Laugh, chortle.
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I’ve tried to understand and replicate what’s funny for as long as I can remember, and in my first decade was raised on comedy greats like Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor. Yet early-80s Murphy goes on long riffs mimicking gay male mannerisms and speech patterns, so watching parts of Delirious today is cringey to say the least. But it was funny back then, right? No matter how our country voted in November 2024, outside of evangelical circles, queerness is no longer the cultural taboo it once was; making fun of it makes no sense. What I’ve kept from Murphy and Pryor is their potty and body humor. Outside of the comedy of motherhood, though, much of what’s made me laugh on this long road of middle age has been driven by what I believe to be true about culture and politics. Which has me asking here at the twilight of 2024 (and possibly democracy), what’s funny?
Despite spending many hours every day trying to perform funny for my captive audience of two children and one husband, plus a rotating assemblage of several dozen students at the University of Alabama, I can’t answer the question. What elicits laughter is just as subjective and personal as what elicits orgasm. The “what’s funny?” quandary has been analyzed by the most exceptional minds across millennia. Aristotle and Plato put forth the superiority theory of reflexive glee at the misfortune of others. My muted laughter had the hair hat guy spilled then slipped on his own whiskey, for instance. Pascal postulated the still-dominant incongruity theory, when there’s an inconsistency between an expected outcome and what actually happens. This one applies best for jokes with punchlines, such as this classic from Rodney Dangerfield: “My psychiatrist told me I was crazy, and I said I wanted a second opinion. He said, ‘Okay, you’re ugly, too.’” Or a less famous example: the first sentence in this essay. Freud believed humor’s primary motivator was the release of repressed psychic energy, whether violent or sexual. He’d have a field day with me, my son, and our balls. There are dozens more humor theories—research labs at universities study these concepts year-round; one is slightly-amusingly named HuRL—but none I’ve ever heard is all-encompassing. They all feel situationally narrow, applicable to particular circumstances in particular times.
Juxtaposing my recent airport interactions with my classroom observations through this election season—examining two very different constituencies of people—got me considering these circumstances and times may call for a new comedic paradigm. Is it possible to be funny in a way that would both make the aggressive man in the hair hat and also my highly literate, Gen Z, mostly-left-wing graduate writing students laugh? Could doing so save our country?
I mean, I doubt it, but one day in my creative nonfiction class filled with several funny students, I began pondering who is funny to whom, and how and why. It began when Noah made a seemingly innocuous comment on Mike’s essay. “I love your humor,” he said. “It’s so perfectly dry.”
No one will ever call my humor dry, I thought to myself miserably. Then, because I love and trust my students, I expressed this regret aloud. “Why is ‘dry’ the only adjective we can ever come up with for humor?” None of us could figure it out. “If one type of humor is dry, wouldn’t the opposite type of humor be wet?”
We began discussing why, feeling excluded from dryness, I immediately identified as a wet humorist. According to AI Overview, the opposite of dry humor (or dry “humour”—is the word funnier when you add the second u?) is slapstick, but wet humorists like me also find opposition to dry humorist’s emotional neutrality: wet is highly emotional. It thrives on audience appreciation. Wet is needy and self-deprecating, exuberant and playful, happy to be the butt (or balls) of the joke. Willing to go to any length for a laugh. Dry is observational, focused on musings or ideas, seemingly above all this laughter business (do the dry’s ever truly laugh?). It can sometimes take a moment to register when a dry humorist is being hilarious. Wet, meanwhile, doesn’t wait; it pours a bucket of itself over your head. To use a 90s comic-duo analogy with which many students were unfamiliar, wet is to Chris Farley as dry is to David Spade.
“Does this have anything to do with geography?” I wondered. “Like am I wet because I’m from the bottom of the soup bowl in New Orleans, where hurricane season is never over?”
Ty recalled their visit to Nola just a couple years before. “It’s not just wet down there, but damn hot.”
Hot damn. If there was wet and dry humor, wouldn’t it logically follow there could also be hot and cold? The idea of locating humor within four quadrants lit up the four chambers of my heart, because now I was thinking back to two decades ago during the last presidential cycle when it felt like nothing would be funny again. Remember when a fascist dum-dum who’d taken us to war on false pretenses was reelected? Back then, pre meme culture, the Political Compass Test went viral on the internet: four quadrants decided whether one fell to the right or left on both social and economic scales of governance. The test contains dozens of philosophical questions, and I took it many times over to ensure I was indeed who I thought I was.
I don’t have the technological skills to create a Buzzfeed-like quiz determining which quadrant one falls into on the Funny Compass™ we spontaneously created in class, but the way I began to understand it in those minutes under my students’ tutelage, I am a hot and wet humorist (humbly disabused of those adjective’s sexual innuendos, Freud). Hot humor is angry and reactionary, and cold humor is seemingly indifferent and detached. Both often hinge on the hell that is other people, but if hot humor (loudly, explosively) punches down, cold (insidiously, calculatingly) pinches down. With hot, you feel the punch more deeply in the moment, but that icy cold pinch can be longer-lasting. Hot thrives off audience reaction, and cold does not give AF. Put another way:
The curly-haired woman in Fresno? Cold and dry. The hair hat guy in Vegas? Hot and dry (or moist, perhaps, if you count the hat, though I read his adornment as deadly earnest.). Both their brands of humor—and much American humor, if we’re being honest—rely on cynicism and meanness. How much of this has been exacerbated by the politics of the past decade? Another thing that’s niggled me for much of that time is how a substantial portion of the electorate—right, left, and center, I’ve heard all the annoying “let’s think about this another way” podcasts—contends that part of 45/47’s appeal is his humor, his comedy-routine-via-political-rallies. This is the piece of analysis I cannot abide. Yes, he says and does terrible things, and I hate all he stands for, but mainly this motherfucker ain’t funny.
But. Common sense and my earlier assertion tell us that what makes a person laugh is subjective, so I must acknowledge that for many, Trump incites genuine, I’m-fully-with-you laughter. And what’s worse, shortly after drawing my Funny Compass™ in class and situating myself inside of it, I allowed myself about twelve seconds of satisfaction before this horrific realization: if we applied my compass to Trump, he and I fall in the same lower lefthand quadrant. We’re both hot and wet, though for vastly different reasons. He’s angry at the “injustices” against him and punches wildly against them. I’m angry that so many people agree with his definitions of injustice, and punch wildly at those hair-hatted men and nearly half of all American women.
I’ve found myself at the center of the horseshoe of my humor theory. I’ve been a comedic bully toward those I’ve felt didn’t fall into my ideal quadrant of comedy or politics, which I’ve ignored because bullying only seemed wrong when they did it. I’m asking questions that my writing itself answers: in this essay I’ve repeatedly made fun of Republican laughter, one of the purest forms of expression we have. How much sense does it make that I’ve chafed when they made fun of ours? (Cue the infinite, snide laughing Kamala memes.) But of course, it’s not the style of one’s laughing at issue here at all. The mocking of laughter is a substitute for mocking others’ values and priorities. For the past decade a lot of what we in the “correct,” left-hand quadrants have found bitterly, derisively funny is them. What they in the right-hand quadrants have found bitterly, derisively funny is us. How can we abide these oppositional affinities?
That’s sort of my point in all of this: I won’t abide it anymore. We can take online quizzes to help us define ourselves in ways we’ve already decided upon, but we’re not safe inside our quadrants. We’re all living in the same place, and it’s the humorless cynics who want us to believe there are no commonalities or possibilities for connection beyond our outlined perimeters. And remember, we’re living in the age of climate disaster: we’re all mixed up in a rotating mess of hot and cold and wet and dry at any given time. This dismantles the functionality of my Funny Compass™ even more. Which is fine. Because whatever climate you claim to come from or belong to, whatever tests you take or create for yourself, whatever your purported “final destination” may be on any travel day, no one knows where the hell we’re going. While we’re still here, wherever that may be, my hope is that rather than boxing folks out of my comedy, I invite as many people as possible to laugh with and at me.
Which reminds me: I left out an interaction between me and the curly-haired woman in Fresno. She eventually lost her sense of toilet paper humor in the long line, and tried commiserating with me about the TSA’s attitude: “They’re just barking orders at us this morning, aren’t they?” I mumbled something about none of us having had a proper cup of coffee yet, and she shrugged. Then I noticed our luggage emerging from the rolling scanner, back-to-back; our silver suitcases were nearly identical. Without thinking the bit through, I waved my arm Vanna White-style, offering the woman to collect her luggage first. “This suitcase is yours.” Then I gestured to the one with the Saints scarf wrapped around the handle. “Mine is the one with the bomb in it.”
This punchline, I can see writing it out now, is colder and drier than my usual humor—perhaps catering to my audience?—though I performed it with my typical wet panache. Like I said, the borders of the Funny Compass™, like the borders of our politics, aren’t as rigid as we might think. I don’t even know why I was trying to be funny just then, why I tossed such a bold invitation toward someone unlikely to accept it. Was I testing her? Was I begging to get thrown on the ground by irritable TSA at 5 a.m.? Would I die for a dumbass, ill-timed joke? The answers to all of the above are “yes, and.” But the answers don’t even matter, because the curly-haired woman laughed her ass off. She chortled. And it really was the prettiest sound.
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Brooke Champagne is the author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, published with the Crux Series in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press. She was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay, and her work has been selected as Notable in several editions of the Best American Essays anthology series. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. She lives in Tuscaloosa, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.
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