From: Jasper
Remote User:
Date: 06 Feb 2005
Time: 09:10:23 -0500
Nomi, ……..Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about with the llamas and now the alien babies (as if you didn’t know)? The three of us have been victimized by media manipulations of our images. No matter how good or bad a joke is some people will not find it funny and some will laugh their heads off the way I do at the llama jokes you and Mario tell. ………When you analyze any joke, the funny part is not in the punch line; it’s in the blank spot after the punch line – the part that people fill in with their own experience and their own sense of exquisite reality or absurd fiction. But when you analyze it, it stops being funny. You have to open a pressure release valve with a pleasant surprise to unleash the humor fairy. I am as surprised by the jokes I tell as you are. I “see it” or “hear it” and it just comes out. I bet it’s the same with you and Mario. ……….You have to “hear” John Junot’s 3 l-lama joke in an Italian accent to get it. If a three-alarm fire killed someone you knew or if someone you cared about was persecuted for speaking with an Italian accent, you wouldn’t think it was funny. If it struck you as just a clever play on words, you would. ……….At its core, there is noting more personal or serious than a joke. People who know us know that the caricatures the media made us out to be are faces painted on llamas. It was crushing when it happened because people who didn’t know us bought it and treated us accordingly – like a guy we know who was “photographed” wearing a killer’s shoes. His “absurd” denial brought a joke instantly to the mind of one E! TV commentator. Speaking for O.J., he said, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” –Jasper