Assuming this joke is funny…
I had the pleasure this last week of working with one of my favourite comedians, Bengt Washburn. Watching him work is inspiring. It often surprises me when new comics don’t watch the pros perform - you can always learn a lot from the experience. One thing that Bengt showed me was the ability to find the “big picture” from a small joke or premise, and that exact thing happened this past week…
For the past few months I have been working on a joke with an introduction line of: “a little bit of racism saves lives”. The joke, on it’s own, is working out fairly well - but it lacks a couple of other elements to bring together to start to create a truly insightful moment in the show. Well, inspiration hit last week…
The “big picture” for this joke is all about our assumptions. It is our assumptions that save our lives (and if not, saves our time). I have always hated hearing the expression: “When you assume you make an ass out of you and me.” Hardly, how about: “When you use that expression you make an ass out of you.”
Having to wake up everyday and verify everything you know would take more than the entire day and thousands of years ago would have resulted in your death. Assuming that a predator wants to eat you is a good thing. Assuming that a gun-weilding maniac may be dangerous is a good thing. Assuming that gravity still works every morning just makes sense (if you don’t make this assumption you may end up wearing a tinfoil hat and waiting for the aliens to return).
It then occured to me that our base assumptions (the assumptions that we use most often) define who we are. People that assume everything is going to be alright become optimists, people that think the best of others quickly gain new friends, and people that assume the worst become politicians.
So our goal shouldn’t be to stop making assumptions but to make sure that our assumptions result in the type of person that we want to be. Hopefully, I can find the funny in this whole thing - I guess I have some writing to do…
(Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink” also touched on this subject about how the human brain quickly makes decisions/assumptions.)
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:27am
[...] this very generous credit does not appear in the magazine I am assuming that they had to cut five words from the final draft and they could not be spared from anywhere [...]