About High Oddness

High Oddness? What’s that?

It’s my name for the things that tickle my funny bone, which are a hair off the beaten track.

One of the things I can offer you … is the lighter side of my odd little universe.

Just maybe I can tickle your funny bone, too. (God knows we need a good laugh sometimes.)

Humorous Encounters of the Odd Kind …
(and the Pioneering Purveyors of Same)
 

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

             – Mark Twain

Even those who can’t admit it to themselves love to laugh. Laughter is one of those few things in Life that, when we do it, loves us back.

Beyond the obvious, Comedy, at it’s best, can serve us in even more exotic ways, offering us to a front row seat to vistas we had never imagined possible.

The kind of humor I have come to find particulary delightful is the kind of material that plays with your mind a little bit, where a fuse is lit that the comedian knows after a brief time delay will hit the gunpowder in your brain and blow your mind against the wall of the unexpected.

I prefer a gentler, less abrasive humor than some. And, personally, I prefer humor that doesn’t insult my intelligence (or, on the flip side, treat me like an idiot), and doesn’t hammer me with the Seven Words You Can’t Say on (broadcast) Television. (If someone can be funny without swearing, going “blue,” or punking out, that someone really is funny.)

I was probably influenced by the up and coming comedians during the time of my childhood — Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, and the mad genius himself, Jonathan Winters. Steve Allen was always welcome, as well as the non-PBS Muppets, and the comic troupe that surrounded Andy Williams in the 1970s was just wacked enough that it could always tickle my funny bone.

George Carlin, of course, played spokesman for the Hippy Generation, though in the background the raw genius of The Firesign Theatre wildly blazed new comedic frontiers, but unhappily never received the attention and accolades they truly deserved.

But then, in the mid 1970s, something new emerged.

I remember meeting my father’s eyes in mirthful agreement in the recognition of the riotous talent of Steve Martin, when he first appeared on Johnny Carson, shortly before his ice cream suit days. And I remember my first experience of the explosive talent of Robin Williams shortly prior to his Mork and Mindy days, and was so captivated that I would rarely miss the drivel that was that series, just to get more of Robin.

It was a sort of Pop Surrealism, an admittedly counterculture and drug-inspired set of new perspectives on reality. A few years later, Steven Wright broke all the rules (again) and reinvented comedy with his own intense but dissociated vision.

Here was humor exploring the boundaries of the known, stumbling across and falling face-first into the cosmic egg at the beginning of the Universe, and discovering the yoke was on us.

This is the face of humor that draws me — the face that looks upon the terrors of the paradoxes of this thing we call Reality and has the nerve to laugh at God, at the devil, at Infinity, and at the core of what makes us these lost little things known as human beings.

Yeah.

Okay … I’ll stop being serious now.

About That Which is Termed “High Oddness”

Indeed.

If you’re a UFO buff, you’ve probably already guessed this expression is a play on words to the phrase “High Strangeness,” a term attributed to the late J. Allen Hynek to connote an event that was far more unusual than most — odd synchronicities, unusually strange beings or apparitions, psychic manifestations, and so on.

In the past, I’ve been accused of being highly strange, but my lawyer managed to plea bargain it down to “endearingly odd.”

I’ll cop to that … or at least plead “No Contest.”

•

Click here to see my latest postings of High Oddness.

© 2009, 2010 by Daniel Brenton. All Rights Reserved.