Hey there, I'm a hungry li'l hatchling, full
of 'pith and vinegar', as you can see from my photograph—and if you think I
look funny, you ought'a see yourself
from my vantage point! Ha! Maybe I was born
yesterday, but my ancestors were dinosaurs, while yours just monkeyed around
during the great devolution: the survival of the unfittest (And if
evolution is true, somebody or something had to have had a sense of
humour to do such a thing to our Jurassic predecessors...Ouch!
Something just hit me in the head...the sky must be falling! You gotta watch
out for those assteriods. Just look what happened to those guys back then!
How do you spell humour? I spell it
s-e-n-r-y-u. If you're a Westerner, try pronouncing that for a
tongue-twister and you can even
make the Japanese laugh! Senryu is more or less all about humour, isn't
it? Oh, didn't you know? Well, I'm sorry but that's a fact, Jacques! True,
there are unfunny
senryu which have UGACHI (see PART I of this
study). Even then, senryu with UGACHI would be much better if
humour were found there, too. I
might go so far as to say that UGACHI is a form of humour—even if
it is not for the unsophisticated. Or, shall we just say that
UGACHI is a sense of humour in disguise? In other words, you really
cannot write something serious and call it a UGACHI senryu.
(You dig?)
In fact, in nine cases out of ten, humour is
present in all kinds of senryu if you know where to look. If you
can't find it, don't come to me—you need an appointment with a
good optometrist. No, I don't have an attitude problem...but you
might have a perception problem. As the lazy man's guru,
Thaddeus Golas said, Inside
yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you
see it.
On the other hand, universal-hitchhiker
Douglas
Adams has warned us: If it
looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the
possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our
hands. Well, you see, really, humour is
everything! What, may I ask, constitutes a sense of humour? Don't you have a
funny bone like we-un's of the feathered tribes?
You know, 'birds of a feather...'? (never mind). Think about it: why
do you humans laugh in the first place?
If you want a philosophical answer, you might want to go to philosophers
such as
Henri Bergson. If you want a psychological answer,
I suppose Freud is as good as any, especially if you secretly enjoy the
occasional Freudian slip or a snickering slight of pee-pee envy. If you want
a scientific answer, you'd best visit your hypothalamus. It's couched
somewhere deep in
the limbic system, your 'reptilian brain'. Yes, Virginia, even
crocodiles have a hypothalamus (probably why their grins are so
wide)—chimpanzees laugh and rats giggle. If,
by now you don't know by our own behavioral patterns of bluff and
mimicry, us bird-brains
just want to have fun, too! Bring
home a
parrot and you'll find out for yourself (and ol' Henri thought
only humans were capable of humor and laughter!).
But if you want a really hilarious answer
on human laughter from the scientific community, read the following
quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association:
December 7, 1984, Journal of the
American Medical Association:
Although there is no known`laugh center' in the brain, its neural
mechanism has been the subject of much, albeit inconclusive,
speculation. It is evident that its expression depends on neural paths
arising in close association with the telencephalic and diencephalic
centers concerned with respiration. Wilson considered the mechanism to
be in the region of the mesial thalamus, hypothalamus, and subthalamus.
Kelly and co-workers, in turn, postulated that the tegmentum near the
periaqueductal gray contains the integrating mechanism for emotional
expression. Thus, supranuclear pathways, including those from the limbic
system that Papez hypothesized to mediate emotional expressions such as
laughter, probably come into synaptic relation in the reticular core of
the brain stem. So while purely emotional responses such as laughter are
mediated by subcortical structures, especially the hypothalamus, and are
stereotyped, the cerebral cortex can modulate or suppress them.
(reference from
Wikipedia)
Usually, nothing ruins jokes faster than
dissecting and examining them to find out what makes ithem laughable. Yet
the funny thing about the above dissertation is that those doctors
studying laughter probably wouldn't even have a clue as to what's so
funny about the above bit of cerebral 'genus'. Read my head. Like
Lorenzo N. Fowler, modern-day JAMA clad phrenologists on the origin and
organ of laughter. Go figure. But some food for thought on the religio-answer side:
since the limbic
system is a throwback to reptiles, does that mean laughter is related to the
crafty Genesis snake of Original Sin (hmmm, senryu... sin-r-u )? Could there be
laughter without tears? Comedy without tragedy? Possibly, but we'd probably looth motht of our pith if we didn't have
our vinegar.
Well, as they say, if
you can't see the bright side of life, polish the dull side.
To find something
truly pithy, or even ridiculously funny, I suggest we look at our question
from the viewpoint of your own mundane and ordinary daily life, if only
because that's where you can find your best senryu material. For instance,
if one day in town you chance to meet someone you know, not once, but twice,
you somehow smile or giggle, don't you? Out of embarrassment or surprise? If
you meet him/her for the third time you get
all in a flap,
roll about in paroxysms of laughter and you just can't stop slapping your leg.
Why?
Judging from the observations
I've
made since I was hatched a few days ago, the laughter of you humans seems to
be triggered by a huge variety of
rib tickling devices, of which here are just a
very few:
-
That which just occurs to one as funny
-
Unfunny things turned funny
-
Bodily secretions, lavatory jokes
-
Anything to do with sex
-
Human failures, mistakes and foibles
-
Differences, deformities, anomalies and
abnormalities
-
Similarities, conformities, analogies,
imitation and associations
-
Opposites, irony, inconsistencies, contradictions, oxymorons
-
Foolishness, drunkenness, absurdities and
slow-wittedness
-
Exaggeration,
amplification, outlandish or far-fetched remarks
-
Understatement, euphemisms
-
Personification, mimicry or imitation
-
Pretense,
hidden or double meanings, innuendo
-
Allegory,
expanded metaphor, personification, anthropomorphism
-
Repetition,
mockery
-
Unexpected occurrences and surprises
-
Outwitting or being one step ahead of the
listener
-
Tools of the funny trade, i.e. making
things funny: pun, play on words,
mispronunciations amphibologia (ambivalence of grammatical structure)
and other hard-to-pronounce tongue-twisters
-
Antics, and so on...
I'll be back...so watch the birdie!
—Chick
READ SELECTIONS: EDITOR'S CHOICE- THE GRAND BEST with
COMMENTARY
for more on ugachi,
read WHCsenryu Special Feature:
BAKUMATSU AND MEIJI UNDERGROUND VERSE FORMS
by Professor Dean
Brink, US
