Pynchon, Adjectives, and Why All Great Writers Must Be Funny (Except Stendhal)

When it comes to "my opinion", we all have our defaults. Defaults, like faults, come in many flavas. One of the most frequently encountered is the adjectival default. When somebody solicits (or depending on how lowbrow they are, asks) your opinion on a certain topic, thing (probably movie, book or album, but maybe food) you no doubt have some safe fall-back adjectives to throw out while you stake out what you actually THINK.

"Awesome!"
"Pretty sweet"
"Kind of boring"
"Interesting but."

For anybody who speaks to me in person, usually about books, the default you get, if it was something I enjoyed, is "funny".

I've called nearly every great classic under the sun "funny". Homer was definitely "funny". Cervantes, Rabelais, naturally, Sterne, surprisingly, "funny". Now Nietzsche also has his moments, and my books Thoreau is a crowning humorist. The whole Rabbinic tradition is one long Catskills routine.

 I reckon I'm the only person in modern history to think the Divine Comedy aptly named without further explication. (Come ON, that fart-trumpet scene with the devils? Black gold!)

Virgil, Pachabel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Russell Brand are all off my guest list because I don't find them "funny" in the least. I need to chortle at least once a page, or I don't like your book.

 (I think the only exception for me is Stendhal, who is more than justified, being a Bonapartist, in lacking a real sense of yuks and still being among the top 5 greatest writers in the last thousand years.)

Why this is? Real cowboys don't cry, so really the only objective (meaning decent) bodily reaction I can trust in is a chuckle. Thus, with a leap of faith so wide it would make Kierkegaard and a self-help therapist proud in equal measure, we come to my personal mantra, "what I laugh at, is, objectively, the greatest!"

Now, having just read, lately, Gravity's Rainbow, I can add it, and Pynchon, to the happy list of gigglers that make up the kaboom of my personal canon. I'm not going to list my favourite jokes (except for the scholastic discussion of "ass backwards", the adventures of Byron the lightbulb, fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch! and nearly every scene with Marvy), but I will say that the book, having been read, reverse engineered a lot of what I previously thought might be funny, into is.

I always thought the great novels of the "classic american + modernist" bunch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, etc. to be particularly funny. Now Gravity's Rainbow shares a similar kind of joke. A kind of conceptual "uh-hyuk" thought goes back to Homeric simile. I mean the "Just as a             climbing a mountain-reared         , so too Achilles..." which are always kind of smile-inducing.

Now Pynchon made me realize that Plato was funnier than I thought in being the first to really invent the "ONE BIG SIMILE" genre. In The Republic, the joke is to cram the entirety of the human soul, errors, byways, naughty bits and the few straight-men, into the framework of the ancient Greek polis. The crux is like teenagers in art class saying "Imagine if we built a giant c(l)ock tower out of lego!" and cackling maniacally.

But the joke only becomes really hysterical when the concept is  planned out. Class after class. Serious, frowning faces, electrons and proteins dedicated to making this really good. The whole tower, the design, the function ("an observation deck! Bahaha!") have to refer back to the initial punchline. This is where all inside jokes and great literature get their "sell" power - details. It turns out that Plato does this exactly this, only with constitutions.

Now Moby Dick (sic) does it with a whale. Ulysses with the city of Dublin. Pynchon, easily enough, does it with a rocket. The technical details (whale blubber, Dublin street meat, rocket schemata), the accuracy in all three cases make the joke even FUNNIER, make it transcendental. It's no longer a passing simile for a smirk - it's an institutional SATIRE.

Laugh-out loud funny isn't just a joke - it's a joke that you get in the presence of others who don't, won't, can't see the penis for the trees.

P.S. Sorry this post isn't that funny itself. Dr. Johnson called fun "a low cant word" and I agree that one can't both talk about and be it.