You have perhaps heard the old saw “for those who think life is a comedy, and for those who feel a tragedy.” This is fodder for the depressed, over-intellectualized-yet-angst-ridden college kid.
Think about what makes us laugh. Is it not ridiculousness? Vanity? Greed? People bumping into things, tripping unexpectedly. Consider Seinfeld. Were not most episodes not about nothing, but rather about neurotic, selfish people acting neurotic and selfish?
Comedy is dysfunction. It, also, consists in dramatic hamartias, but flaws expressed in unexpected ways which generate and release tension.
Here is a funny story, from one of the Darwin Awards books: two Marines developed a routine whereby they would drive in a truck, and on left turns, one would swing out on the door, then swing back in. Most of us have thought about doing that. It was amusing. Then one of them hit a lightpole, was flung into the cab, and knocked the other guy out his door. Fortunately the truck came to a halt, and neither was permanently wounded. That catapult image, though, I find amusing. My kids did too.
Why? They were both hurt. The accident was stupid and preventable. But don’t many of us see why someone would do that? Do we not see in them, perhaps, a bit of our own silliness, and laugh from relief that it WASN’T us?
What we find funny has a lot to do with how we set our default expectations for life. If we expect it to be easy, then every little bit of pain out there saps us, and drags us down. Nothing is funny, if funny consists in an ironic appreciate of the misery and stupidity of others. It’s all just a bore; it’s all just work.
If we expect life to be hard, then we realize that all of us are stupid, and we learn to appreciate and laugh at all the little things that happen to us. I managed to set my oven on fire last night. After I put it out, and got the smoke detector stopped, I thought it was funny. That’s not a bad story. Not just everyone is stupid enough to set their oven on fire. My kids thought it was funny too.
It seems to me, too, that you have to have multiple selves to analyze and process life properly. If you are analyzing humor, it isn’t funny. You have to be able to switch back and forth, here and there. This is the Tao, at least in part.