Saturday, August 21, 2010

AS senses of humor: satire/parody

I am clearly missing some fundamental insights into how the world works: so much of it makes no sense whatsoever.
So many of us feel that way of course, because the glitch in our brains either makes it impossible or very hard to get those insights. So of course besides fish-out-of-water stories and characters (aliens, robots and foreigners) - Spock, Data the android, Mork, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Latka on Taxi (who also has goofy front personalities), Balki on Perfect Strangers - many of us love comedy that makes fun of the normals' absurdity and hypocrisy, from Monty Python (I'm sure a number of us, like with our cousins among the normals, nerds, have memorized and like to quote whole sketches) to The Simpsons. Andy Kauffman's schtick as Latka falls under that too: the cute, childlike, clueless foreigner tries to guess at and imitate normal American behavior and becomes an obnoxious caricature. So do Mork, 3rd Rock and Perfect Strangers.

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