Blogging State of Mind

Stand in the place where you live
Now face north
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven’t
Now stand in the place where you work
Now face west
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t before

Now that I've been blogging almost a year, I realize that whenever I do anything, I'm thinking about blogging about it. It's a rather unnatural feeling, because I'm consciously aware of it. I'm thinking of phrases and words I want to use, trying to piece out the ideas in my head, so I can type it up.

The funny thing is there's something that I already do that's comparable, but I've done it for so much longer that I don't think about it anymore, and that's trying to be funny. Being funny is incredibly difficult. There are some people who clearly know they should avoid being funny, a few who don't know and try anyway, even if they mostly come up lame (how lame they come up depends very much on the audience), and others who are hysterical.

Here are a few rules of thumb. Laughing is contagious. You're always funnier in front of a large crowd than a small one, because once you hear someone laughing, you're more likely to laugh yourself.

Humor is often about playing against expectations or seeing something that should strike us as funny, but doesn't always. For example, Mike Birbiglia says that Busta Rhymes interjects his name in songs (even if it's surely not his real name) and Mike wants to do the same. It sounds cool when Busta does it and humorous when Mike does it.

Some people find shocking humor funny, while others find it offensive. I told this joke once. Do you know why Indira Gandhi was shot so many times (she was the prime minister of India who was assasinated by her own Sikh guards)? They were aiming for the dot. Why is this amusing? For a while, people are thinking, what dot? Oh, Indian women were a dot. Oh, they were aiming for that, and it's hard to hit. Ah, I get it.

Of course, it's also offensive because someone was killed, after all, due to that. The few people listening didn't find it funny. I suspect there were jokes told about 9/11, though personally I don't know of any (I do know Challenger jokes). Those kind of jokes try to diffuse tragedy with comedy, and are edgy, and often inappropriate to a certain audience.

Birbiglia also does a routine where he is alternately making fun of white and black alike called "Cracka Please". At one point he says "You may not call us 'crackers'. Only we may call each other 'crackers'. You can call us 'crackas', but not 'crackers'", which is one of those riffs on the "N" word, which is funny partly because it's white people doing black people, but also, perhaps inheritly funny because the distinction between those two words is trivial, and yet, people draw that distinction (much like Coke and Pepsi).

He then says "people say 'white bread'...why that's not even an insult. That's my race and a food item. I can do that too, 'black bean soup', Stay out of this 'Asian Chicken Platter'". Of course, race is a touchy issue, even made more touchy because some people find it an artificial categorization, yet people relate so much to it culturally that it might as well serve as some kind of real indicator.

When I listen to people talk, I'm trying to think of something humorous, which may be repeating a phrase that people have thought was funny, or making a pun out of something, or what have you.

The toughest kind of humor is physical humor, because you have to work at it. I remember listening to Dave Thomas, writer of Ruby books, talking about flying a plane, something he likes to do. He talks about how his flight instructory says that he's going to note a certain sensation as he flies, and he's going to make a mistake, and he's going to have to fight it. Dave thinks "Since you've already told me, I'm warned, so I should be good" and yet when he takes the plane out for real, he's doing those motions that his mind told him not to do.

And he's showing his body jerking as he's simulating the flight of the plane. Not only does it make for an interesting story, where you're hooked, but as a person who wants to tell jokes, it's the kind of physicality you marvel at. In other words, realizing what Dave is doing makes you appreciate all the more how he's doing it.

Tom, the psychology grad student, tells about a Russian girl who's also in the department, who he claims walks as if she has one of those poles that strippers dance too. Now, this is savvy in several ways. First, you have know about stripper poles, at least seen images of it before. He's creating a visual that works for all but the most wholesome. Then, as a guy, and presumably non-stripper, he's now trying to gyrate and move around like this girl, more than likely, far exaggerating every movement she makes.

Making fun of someone is particular challenging because, much like a caricutarist, you're trying to find something to exaggerate that's recognizable and funny. Impersonators also do this. There's an impersonator, Frank Caliendo, who does Clinton, Bush, John Madden, and a whole slew of other people. When he makes fun of Madden, he has Madden talk about Brett Favre all the time. For example, he says "Madden manages to work Brett Favre in everything. He'll be talking about stuff like hybrid turf: which is half fake and half real. But let me tell you someone that's all real. Brett Favre."

Humor is challenging because it's very audience dependent. Someone who doesn't follow football may not find that so funny. American humor is rather sophisticated because it relies on a lot of pop-culture knowledge. Many immigrants, for instance, don't follow popular music, Hollywood, movies, etc. So these jokes fly over their heads. It flies over my parents heads. If they can't track pop-culture, can they even begin to track Internet culture which requires a great deal of surfing around?

For example, Wikipedia. If you don't surf the web, do you know it exists? Do you know what a Wiki is? Do you know why it's used? Do you know about fake entries being put in the Wikipedia? Are you smart enough to realize that despite that, Wikipedia has a lot of good stuff in it?

When I blog, I'm not really thinking about humor, so much. I'm writing down stuff that interests me. I'm trying to draw several different points together. I'm hoping it makes a modicum of sense. I'm trying to practice writing, even as I need to edit more.

Perhaps if I do this a lot more, I won't even think about how I'm planning what to blog as being unnatural. I'll just see it as my normal state of mind.

Of course, this is what happens when you have too much time on your hands while you blog. You begin to think about thinking about blogging. It all becomes very meta.

Oh, do I have to explain meta? Hmm, OK, here it goes. In the study of logic, you learn a logic language which is a bit like a programming language. It has rules. It should, like a programming language, also have semantics, i.e., meaning. But how do you describe the meaning? You can do so in a meta-language, i.e., a language to describe the logic language.

If that sounds confusing, I'll make an analogy. Suppose you want to study the English language. To do so, you need a way to describe the English language. Nouns, verbs, rules of grammar, and so forth. This is a meta-language. Now typically, you describe English in English though certainly you could pick any other suitably expressive language to do so. For example, if you study Spanish, you'll often learn the grammar rules by having someone explain it to you in English.

To introspect about something. To think about thinking is considered "meta". In movies, this is also called navel-gazing which is again staring at oneself. Languages like Java have even built a facility to introspect called reflection.

That's meta.