Sunday, December 11, 2011

Need a Sitter?

New York, New York

2 comments:

Dennis said...

Apropos of nothing really and I'm sure it's me but...99.9% of what passes for comedy these days is completely lost on me.

Carl Weese said...

Well you certainly picked up my bemusement at this, Dennis.

One thing I've noticed is that, while I'm 62 years old, so certifiably an old fart, a more important issue is that I have watched essentially no TV for nearly thirty years. If a joke is "a standard" from a popular sitcom, or a reference or riff on same, I'll have no idea. If a joke is from "Seinfeld", no episode of which I've ever seen, or some other—forgive the phrase, Classic—I'll get it because it's part of the zeitgeist and I've picked up the referents from reading about pop culture. A great deal of the humor people use is borrowed or extrapolated from the sitcoms they watch, or jokes on "reality TV" like Dancing With the Stars where, I'm told, quips and nasty humor are used by the judges. I'm clueless about any of this, but I'm always delighted to meet someone with a direct and original sense of humor, who says funny things or gets funny takes on things: encountering people like this is one of the reasons I go to the trouble to teach the workshops at CAP. People who want to learn platinum printing tend to have other virtues as well.