[Vision2020] Big Names in Credenda/Agenda

[Joan Opyr]

>C/A: F.H. Buckley argues in The Morality of Laughter that humor is deeply moral and requires a butt. Do >you agree with this, and if so, how would you say this relates to your writing?  

>PJ: Humor—good humor, at least, in both senses of the term—is probably not possible without a >realization that the world has a moral order and an equal realization that one is hopeless at >understanding how that moral order works. To be technical, "humor" is a perception of how things are >and have been and will be, as much as we try to pretend otherwise (a sense of the "humors"—bile, >phlegm, and so forth). "Satire" is humor with a specific moral point to make. The rest is one or another >form of mockery, which is just aggression with slippers and pipe. As I have said elsewhere: "There are >three forms of humor: satire, where you make fun of people who are richer than you are; parody, >where you make fun of people who are smarter than you are; and burlesque, where you do both while >taking off your clothes."  

What interests me about this is that O'Rourke deflates the whole of Doug Wilson's worldview in the first sentence of his answer.  So, the world has a moral order, but we're hopeless at understanding how it works?  You mean Doug doesn't really have all the answers?  He just thinks he does?

We knew it all along.  Funny lurks in that cognitive dissonance the real and the imaginary.
   
Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment

PS: Do you really find P. J. O'Rourke funny?  He's forever falling flat on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," especially next to Roy Blount, Jr.  And as for William F. Buckley . . . there's a difference between humor and har-de-har-har.  Thanks, but no thanks.  Make mine a Margaret Cho. Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
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