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Theater Humor

There's two kinds of humor, or rather--senses of humor.

I learned this recently when I found an extremely inappropriate joke funny while it seemed to appall everyone else around me.

Some people like regular humor, and I like theater humor.

Theater humor being wildly offensive and grossly distasteful.  That's the stuff that's guaranteed to make me laugh.  The sort of thing the class clown yells at the teacher from the back of the class, or a joke told about somebody who's only been dead for five minutes, or pretty much any joke told at a roast.

Virtually nothing makes me laugh out loud (despite what all of my Internet conversations say), but that kinda stuff does.

For awhile, I didn't think of it as a separate kind of humor.  I would laugh at a joke, and if other people didn't, I would assume they didn't have a sense of humor at all.  Now I realize they probably did, and I'm just depraved and need mental help--or it's just that I do theater.

Let's face it--most theater people are interested in some morbid shit.  At the very least, we're not easily shocked.  We all swear, we love playing murderers and assholes, and we all know at least one disgusting knock knock joke involving a cow and the Prime Minister of Amsterdam.

(So they're in the boat, and the Prime Minister says--What are those udders for?)

I now realize that I have to pay attention to the crowd I'm in if I'm going to try to be funny or laugh at something I think is funny.  Luckily enough for me, I'm pretty much always with theater people, so I don't anticipate it being a huge issue.

By the way, did you hear the one about the parrot and Woody Harrelson?

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