laughter

Have you ever seen/heard something that is totally dumb, but makes you laugh like crazy, and makes you even laugh when you're not looking at it - when you're just thinking about it?

And it becomes the kind of laughter-in-church thing, where you have to be really careful not to think about it at inappropriate times to laugh or else you're going to be laughing again?



This picture does it to me (it's screengrabbed from I can has cheezburger?, which is one of the dumbest funny - or funniest dumb - websites out there. N.B. that not everything on there is totally family friendly - some of the humor is pretty crude.)

And yes, I know - I should feel sorry for the poor cat with the cone on its head, that cannot successfully eat its food. And I kind of do. And yet, at the same time - it's just funny to me. "FAIL" and then the picture of the spilled food. It makes me laugh so hard that I'm almost crying. I don't even have to be looking at it, just thinking of it makes me chuckle.

I do not know why - but for some reason those stupid captioned pictures make me howl with laughter. Even the ones that take a joke too far, as in the hundreds of "I'm in UR (x) doing (y)" variants, or the "Invisible (item that cat appears to be using)!" meme.

I think part of the reason it's funny is the non-standard English...I mean, you'd not expect cats and bunnies to speak the Queen's English perfectly, no? And part of it is the fact that these pictures were taken, and THEN captioned....that someone had to come up with a caption for an existing picture.

I wonder how this kind of thing started? I've heard of the O RLY owl (which now has its own website: owl. That's also something that I find inexplicably funny.

I think I've said before that I find absurd things, things that are incongruous, to be funny. (I think my favorite line on the Simpsons, ever, was early in the series when Homer found a waffle that had been stuck to the ceiling that he had, for some reason, assumed was God. When Marge pulled the waffle down, Homer looked at it and said, "I know I should not eat thee but....Mmmmm, sacrilicious!" Okay, so I like bad puns too.)

I also like things that are referential. One of the reasons I still watch the Simpsons (and even occasionally watch Family Guy, although it borders on the too-crude-for-me) are all the weird little pop culture references that are stuck randomly in there.

Perhaps that's why I'm willing to put up with the 500 variants of "I can has....?" on that site - that they're all referring back to the original, and best: