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Leibniz — and Black Humor (Alan Sinder)

(Redirected from Leibniz — and Black Humor (Alan Sinder))

This page is to connect Pythonesque humor to NTS and and Wallace via Leibniz

Stephensonia

Throughout Neal's books we see black humor - as in the way Snow Crash's 'dead avatars' are handled in the Black Sun to Half-cocked Jack's internal conversations revealed to be loud, external, and audible. As the famous Lupin sketch has surfaced - along with the Philosopher's song. The link might be Gottfried and Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss.

Authored entries

Humor is a Work In Progress

As example - we have Daniel (after Enoch's daydream of a future MIT) muse that: "... I could catch a fever and die three days from now and provide Faith and Godfrey with a comfortable pension" which invokes the dry humor of the old funny National/Harvard Lampoon (I suspect Bruce McCall's or P.J. O'Rourke's hand in this) of "how to end a story" (which some critics assert Neal doesn't actually do). The tag was to get hit by a truck or in a British story — a lorry. So we see this black humor revealed in a tagline: "catch a fever and die in three days." And Enoch has the punchline: "There's that added inducement."

Where Leibniz Meets Python

Revisiting Monty Python and the Holy Grail eventually gets us to the place where: E_k = \frac{1}{2} m v^2

becomes humorous as the pressing question posed in number of key places in the film the question is raised, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow brings us to Leibniz. Style.org's Jonathan Corum responds to comments "... In that case the bridgekeeper's question could be interpreted as a roundabout way of trying to determine "what is the kinetic energy of an unladen swallow?" But then, I don't think Leibniz published a description of kinetic energy until the 1680s, so it's doubtful the bridgekeeper would have known about it centuries earlier. ...[1]"

We can see humor often degenerates to the other guy' slipping on a banana peel or falling off the Bridge of Peril; However, Daniel is able to look outside and be amused that Blackbeard the Pirate is after him. There's dark humor in the ticks in the rain of bubonic plague carrying fleas jumping from their dead rat hosts pinging off Daniel's riding boots. Then in the 2nd book — King of the Vagabonds — we've the actual gallow's humor of Bob and Jack assisting the doomed by hanging on to their legs so they'll die faster and cleaner as it were. There's the arseleathers later on in the mine.

The Funniest Joke in the World

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.ernestsc.jpg
Ernest Scribbler

The Funniest Joke in the World is a Monty Python sketch in which, during World War II, British scientist Ernest Scribbler creates the funniest joke in the world and then dies laughing.

Numerous people attempting to investigate also died laughing upon reading the joke. It was finally retrieved by the British Army, and after careful testing, the joke was translated into German for use on the battlefield. Because the joke was so lethal, translators were only allowed to work on one word each; a translator who unfortunately saw two words had to be hospitalised.

The German translation (made up of nonsense pseudo-German) was: "Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das oder die flipperwald gersput!"

The sketch appeared in a first-series episode of the television show and was remade in a shorter version for the movie And Now for Something Completely Different.

This sketch is available on the CD-Rom Game of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

The concept of fatal hilarity is not an uncommon one. David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest deals with a videotape containing a movie so entertaining that anyone watching it loses all desire to do anything else, eventually becoming comatose and dying. Like the translators in the Monty Python sketch, the only person who could watch the movie was the director, who was too insane to be affected by the film.

In addition, much of comedy slang deals with the concept of death, e.g. "I killed them out there."