Conference turris::womannotes-v1

     I was just wondering why there have been no reply's here? Are women
     not intersted in the Collective idea? Just wondering?
    
                                                           Maggie
    

      The intention of this group would be to perform, either as
    individuals or group. The group could use IMPROV, plays, or other
    material. We would perform from the perspective of women + humor,
    women speaking about, to other women. Then once we have some practice,
    we could go out into the wider community. Besides being fun, humor
    can educate and start debate.
    
    So much for intention..in practice we could do anything..left up
    to the members of the group...
    
     
    Maggie

I think this is the greatest idea since toast. (Which came only slightly
after the idea of sliced bread.) ALSO, I spoke to a friend of mine who
is heavily involved with the Women's School, and she loved the idea too. Get
in touch with them and they can help with publicizing the workshop to the
women who would be likely to want to join it, also with space for the
workshop to occur and possibly even performance space and publicity for
that.

Don.

    Oooooo, I love it.  Let me know if I can help in any way.
    

I've moved this back here in aid of continuity.

						=maggie

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Note 173.0                  Back to the future/past?                  No replies
BRUTUS::MTHOMSON                                     10 lines  20-JAN-1987 14:15
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      Just wanted to point back to the note on HUMOR 160.  Are there
    others out there interested in this topic? Feedack is essential,
    I am going to be using the facilities of the Women's School, to
    start a Women's Seminar in Humor (HUMOR 101). Any thoughts,
    suggestions, or ideas. 
    
    Maggie
    

...and moved this up one so that everything still works.

						=maggie

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Note 160.6                Humor,to teach, think,laugh!                    6 of 6
EXCELL::SHARP "Don Sharp, Digital Telecommunication" 11 lines  20-JAN-1987 15:58
                             -< recommended book >-
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(i'm replying here rather than note 173 since this is still on the topic of
humor)

I notice that the book "A Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe"
(or something like that) is recently out on the stands. This was written by
Jane Wagner for Lily Tomlin to turn into a one-woman show. Unfortunatly I
missed the show, but I've always thought Lily Tomlin was outrageously funny,
and now I discover that she's been relying on Jane Wagner for material for
years.  This book might be a good resource for your class.

Don.

Any chance of getting this workshop off the launch pad?

I'll even be a worker ant and type and keep names and poll funny peeps.  
I love jokes, stand up, cartoons, and think the whole boodle is far more 
noble and wonderful and difficult than the literary establishment would 
approve.  (The lit crits are a bunch of jokists.)

Meigs

      Just a Note:  The Women and Humor class is going on now. We are
    located at the Women's School in Cambridge, Ma.  I will be teaching
    this class again. Either at the Women's School or at Cambridge Adult
    Ed. So far the experience has been great. If people are interested
    they can reach me on the Net, or call 226-2129.  I'm going to be
    starting a Women's Humor group, to do open-mike nights ect soon.
    It's called the LAST LAUGH.  My first concert will be on June 20th
    at the Women's Craft Fair, more on that later...thanks for all your
    support, and be funny.
    
     MT

  At the risk of being flamed to a crisp...

  I've always thought that dead baby jokes were a good litmus test for
  separating people with a sense of humor from those who merely think
  they have a sense of humor.  In a similar manner, I offer this one:

    Q: How many feminists does it take to...

    A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!

  Telling this one to the group might provide the same sort of insight.

  JP

>  At the risk of being flamed to a crisp...
>
>  I've always thought that dead baby jokes were a good litmus test for
>  separating people with a sense of humor from those who merely think
>  they have a sense of humor.  


    If dead baby jokes are a test of humor, count me out...
    
    Humor to me is more than telling "a joke", whatever that is.  In
    fact, much of the jokes in our culture are really not too funny.
    They are an exercise in putting "other types" of people down in order
    to make "us types" feel better.  I guess I don't think much of "jokes".
    
    "Comedy", on the other hand, is an environment or context that can
    contain jokes or funny stories or just a series of outrageous
    observations things in our world...comedy can be hilarious.
    
    "Humor" I guess I see as being a broader.  Humor is how I survive
    daily life - it's an attitude of looking at people and events and
    ideas.  Humor is us giving ourselves a good ribbing for our oh-so-
    serious pretensions and platitudes.  Humor is how we raise ourselves
    about the office dispute we had earlier in the day, so that we can
    re-establish our perspective and get right back into the grind the
    next day, only to repeat the whole pattern.  Humor is how we can
    adjust to the compromise of aging and realizing just how many of
    our dreams we will never get to follow.
    
    I think a woman's humor workshop is a great idea.  There's no end
    to the topics we can poke fun at from our unique perspective.  Even
    at feminists...I love to laugh at myself!
    
    						- Dotsie

    Q: How many feminists does it take to...

    A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY!

  Telling this one to the group might provide the same sort of insight.

  JP

    Dead baby jokes were funny to me [even though I thought they were
    pretty bad] until an ex-girlfriend miscarried what would have been
    my first child.
    
    Now they remind me of bad Christa McAuliffe jokes.
    
    and I can usually laugh at ANYthing.  Especially myself.

    Re : .10,.11
    
    Humor can be used to emphasize the wrongs of the "lighter" side 
    of sexism, eg sexism in language (tho to some such a thing doesn't 
    exist), but ...
    
    My (blood) sister (living in New Hampshire) occasionally sends me 
    snippets of the New York Times (once a New Yorker, always a New 
    Yorker ;-).
    
    This arrived on the doorstep this morning (excerpted without 
    permission from the "HERS" column, written by Nancy Mairs)
    
    "My husband's indictment of feminism, for example -- and he's not 
    alone in it -- is that feminists 'lack a sense of humor.'  ... In 
    our pained discussions of human-rights issues in Central America I 
    have never heard him criticize Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees 
    or Sandinista peasants for lacking a sense of humor about their 
    disappeared relatives, their burned infirmaries and bombed buses, 
    their starvation and terror.  Nor should he.  And he shouldn't 
    expect women to crack jokes when they are enraged by the 
    malnutrition, rape and battering of their sisters and the system 
    that makes such occurrences inevitable."
    
    

re .13 by CHEFS::MAURER "Helen" >
>   ... feminists 'lack a sense of humor.'

This is one of those cliches that many minds seem happy to adopt.  Reminds 
me of others:
    o  Ice cubes freeze faster if you start with hot water.
    o  Africans are fast because they have an extra foot bone (especially
       interesting because the skelton has been known for centuries!!!)
    o  A bird cannot fly if you throw salt on the tail feathers.
    o  People of different races exude race-specific sex odors. (From the
       best selling marriage manual of the '20s and '30s.)

Here is proof that feminists do have a sense of humor.

    o  A woman must work twice as hard as a man to prove she is equal.
       Luckily, this is not hard.
    o  If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrment.
    o  God is coming. And is She pissed!!!
    o  Anon was a woman.
    o  Is that a gun in your pocket, honey, or are you just glad to see me?
    o  Also, the expression "brass ovaries" which I hear frequently from
       women and men, in a humorous but approving tone, and occasionally from 
       men in a negative tone.
        
From the essay Helen quoted:
>   And he shouldn't expect women to crack jokes when they are enraged 
    by the malnutrition, rape and battering of their sisters ...

Actually, we do crack jokes.  But for feminists, the joke is only funny a 
few times, then it becomes sort of a slogan or touchstone.  Everybody knows
"If you're black, get back" which I'll bet started life as an off-the-cuff.
Also, to paraphase Dick Gregory "You don't serve black people in this 
restaurant? That's OK. I don't eat black people."  And another also, here 
is the joke that swept European Jewish communities in the late '30s: "Are 
you an Aryan or are you learning English?"

Free Feminist Cartoon!  Send me your mail stop and I'll send you a Xerox of 
my cartoon that portrays how it is between woman and men.  It's fun to show 
people.  All women and some men say "Oooooohhhhhhhhhhh Yeeeeeessssssss" and 
some men say "That's not true. And it's not funny either."       Meigs

  The important thing to remember is that there is a big difference between
  taking yourself seriously and taking your vocation or avocation or mission
  seriously.  I suspect that "... feminists lack a sense of humor" is a
  complaint about the former and not the latter...

  JP

  P.S. Helen, this one is really true:

       o  A bird cannot fly if you throw salt on the tail feathers.

       You have to use a 5-lb block of salt (a bigger block for some raptors)
       but the tricky part is getting close enough to place it on the bird's
       tail without alarming the bird.     

re: .14

"Ice cubes freeze faster if you start with hot water."

Actually, this _is_ true.  I jeered someone ruthlessly for
claiming this 10 years ago, only to find out that experiment,
that constant humbler of theorists, demonstrated it.

The article, (Scientific American, Amateur Scientist) claimed
not to know why, but offered several theories including that
hot tap water has less dissolved air than cold tap water.
Another was that a warm ice cube tray melts through a thin
(sometimes invisible) layer of frost on the bottom of the
freezer and forms a better thermal connection with the freezer
coils.

If you stick to distilled water and labatory conditions, of
course, theory prevails, but in the kitchen and using the
'fridge, the old saying is often true.

Such is the danger of cliches and theories.

- greg

ps: I called that person up and apolgised.  She enjoyed it immensely.

    There is a good book called "There are Alligators in Our Sewers"
    by a folklorist whose name I don't remember.  He went around collecting
    bits of wisdom like the ones cited--there are probably over 1000
    of them in the book.
    
    Many of them were a kind of "unconscious folklore" for me.  I had
    heard them so many times that I had a hard time figuring out which
    were true and which were not in many cases.
    
    
    

re 160.16 by STAR::ROBERT >

>           -< The exception that proves the rule >-

Greg, I am writing this reply to grump about the title of your note,
"the exception proves the rule."  This is Nonsense.

The proverb was born in Elizabethean times, when the word "prove" meant 
"test."  The old meaning is also preserved in the expression "proving 
grounds." If we translate the proverb's meaning into 20th century 
English, we get:  The exception tests the rule.

An exception to the rule means that either the rule is wrong or the 
"exception" needs more examination.

This proverb illustrates the power of words.  To the human mind, the words
are often more powerful than the reality.  A goofy proverb enables the
believer to look with blind eyes.  As in "feminists don't have a sense of
humor." How about Joan Rivers? Kate Clinton? Phyllis Diller? How about me? 

This proverb allows someone to say, "Well, Meigs is a feminist and Meigs
has a sense of humor. But feminists don't have a sense of humor. Obviously,
Meigs is an Exception."

I struggled very hard, as a little kid, to understand the universe, and 
hearing someone utter this proverb would make my stomach knot.

Now that I'm through grumping, let me say that I understand the title was
probably entered tounge-in-cheek because your reply was so well written. But I 
had to speak, this damn proverb was my private childhood albatross.     Meigs

    Bravo Meigs!!!  Misuse of that assertion has locked my jaws more often
    than I can count.  I've always thought it *particularly* incredible
    that people with scientific training will misuse it just as quickly as
    anyone else.  We just don't question authority enough :'}
    
    						=maggie

	re .18: A good case could be made that Joan Rivers and Phyllis
	Diller indeed don't have senses of humor:-)...