Pearl Gross: Comedy on a Higher Octave

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Is she a product of the sterile, insular monoculture of the American south?

Is she such a hard-core follower of her religion, that any attempts to produce funny, original material is stifled and deemed inappropriate by traditional Christian morals and values?

Is she just naturally unfunny?

Is she one of Jay Leno's writers?

Whatever she is, I find myself fascinated with her.

New Yorker Cartoon Editor on humor: (Found via Boing Boing)

The experience of humor is similar to the “ah-ha” moment of two things coming together. For humor, two things have to come together to produce the experience of laughter. Normal and abnormal; these things reconciled in a moment, and usually it’s a normal situation violated in some way that we can tolerate. You have to have something normal that becomes abnormal, or something that looks abnormal and then become normal.

So, normal: there’s a guy on the phone, saying “No, Thursday’s out. How about never - is never good for you?” Everything is normal - the office, the syntax of politeness - and yet the message is rude. We have a violation where we have a
normal situation.

Clearly a subject Ms. Gross has studied extensively.

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Link to New Yorker article