I recently saw a Tumblr post on Instagram that I found humorous and relatable in a few ways. The post was about how this person loves to lick the spoon after stirring brownie batter, and doesn't care about getting "Sal Monella, whoever that is". Further down the post is a picture of Tom from the popular cartoon Tom and Jerry with a top hat on creeping through a doorway. The post portrays Tom as the character "Salvadore Monella". Personally, I found this post funny in many ways. One, it was relatable to me because most everyone grew up hearing from adults that it's not healthy to eat raw batter. Two, the person in the post referred to the bacteria infection salmonella as "Sal Monella" making the disease take a human like form. Lastly, the misspelling and misuse of the word "salmonella" is comedic because we tend to laugh at mistakes, bad grammar, or defects displayed in another person or object. In this case, the misspelling used by the writer of this post was funny to us because we would never think to take a simple term such as salmonella and give it a physical (misspelled) name to pose as an actual person. In terms of the reading, I found the article "Theories of Humor" to aid in my understanding as to why I found this Instagram post particularly humorous. Specifically, the superiority theory was a great matchup to the Instagram post. The superiority theory states that we laugh at people because they have a defect or disadvantage against them (i.e. bad grammar, spelling, degradation, etc.). Overall, I would say the humor in the Instagram post itself accompanied by its poor grammar created a hilarious post and it a perfect example of the superiority theory of humor.
The interesting thing about comedy, in general, is that it's all subjective. What I find hilarious may not even register with someone else as humorous. This same principle is applied to comedy tv shows as well. In response to Jake's blog post, I found some of the points that he raised as interesting. He explained how the show Seinfeld has no overlying plot, and that's what makes it so exceptional. In a way, I agree with him. There is always a time and a place where we just want to laugh, and not worry about keeping up with a detailed plot or keep track of attributes we need to remember in order to understand the show. Seinfeld is definitely that kind of show where you can turn it on and just enjoy the singular episode for what it is. The humor in Seinfeld is a sort of observational comedy, where the premise of the humor is based on going through the motions of everyday life. But referring back to my original point, someone may not be interested in that type of show or hum...
It's interesting to contrast the ways we see this as an incongruity v. as a superiority reaction. Wordplay is often held up as incongruity theory, but in the case of misspellings it's a gray area for sure.
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