Carl William Brown on humour, a short article that explains and introduce the mysterious object of humor and a dissertation by the author about it.
Humor is definitely a form of religion, of course it’s not as generous and solid as other traditional forms of worship. To his faithful theorists, practitioners or even to his martyrs he cannot certainly offer virgin maidens in his paradise, as Islam does; in any case one must be satisfied, at the limit it can offer a dramatis personae disguised as a joker, or if you prefer, a kind of fool!
Carl William Brown
Humor is definitely a form of religion, of course it’s not as generous and solid as other traditional forms of worship. To his faithful theorists, practictioners or even to his martyrs he cannot certainly offer virgin maidens in his paradise, as Islam does; in any case one must be satisfied, at the limit it can offer a dramatis personae disguised as a joker, or if you prefer, a kind of fool!
Carl William Brown
Some time ago Carl William Brown, that is yours truly or the writer of this short introduction if you prefer, completed his thesis on George Mikes (1) and the Humor Phenomenology in the World of Literary and Philosophical Production, a huge and vast job of intellectual research through thousand of books and essays and that brought our author to read, amongst other things, obviously all the books written by George Mikes, to whom first of all go my affectionate regards! This work constitutes the most detailed dissertation about George Mikes’s entire literary production and has also given a lot of ideas for Carl William Brown literary production itself as well as for the making of this humorous website, which is to consider as my highest tribute and homage to my teacher George Mikes.
We must add that the vast dissertation, for accademical reasons, has been written half in italian and half in english so the Publishing Editor who would be interested in it should do some light works of translation before having the pleasure to put on the market what is on of the best research on humor and on Mikes’ production in the world up to our days! But this is a pure digression! Anyway what is done is done and since we believe strongly in it, as J. Barrie put it, this must also be considered our religion, and not only another digression! What’s more this is also a study that teaches the ability to perceive, enjoy, or express what is amusing, comical, incongruous, or absurd in our life and so it helps to avoid some kind of bad accidents or to draw from Greek culture, some kind of Katastrophes!
A great author as Pirandello had also discovered that humor is born from the feeling of the contrary and writers like Mark Twain or J. Swift knew only too well that humor is born from pain and distress and that’s why it constitutes, as Freud put it, one of the most extraordinary psychic methodology to endure the painful events of our lifes. therefore in these lines you can also find the real goal of this website!
We immediately underline however that for us true humor is always “black” and so in this sense it approaches necessarily the fiercest satire and the strongest jokes! We can also add that our humor is born from our deep, surrealist, nihilist and postmodernist nature and that the way to follow to fully appreciate our literary efforts is to live apart your “superego” moral controls in order to see some true and unfamiliar aspects of life, perhaps less conventional, but just for this reason more true!
To end this small introduction I want only to add some George Mikes’ remarks about humor and his surroundings, with the precise goal to pay my gratitude to this author who has made me discover the real value of a humorous lively disposition towards life and all its adversities! To really conclude this prologue I just want to point out that Carl William Brown in the meanwhile has become a full time writer and has produced something as 10,000 aphorisms and numerous essays about humor, power, literature, authority, stupidity, religion, politics, economics and psychology; not to talk of his jobs on the web, where he has created The Daimon Club Organisation which runs several websites and has had in a few years more than several million pages visited, even if most of them are not yet translated into English! Now I have really concluded! For the time being, of course! See you soon then, and enjoy yourselves with my humorous creations and collections! Bye, Bye!
1) George Mikes was an Hungarian gentlemen who went to London for a fortnight on the eve of the second world war, as a journalist, and remained there for the rest of his life. The Hungarian subsequently referred to him as ” the chap who became an English writer “, where as the English have always known him as “the Hungarian”. This dual, or binary identity, led him to write a book entitled How to be an Alien which is an irrelevant study of English idiosyncracies. The book has been a great success, especially with the English themselves and so George during his life wrote also another 36 books, just to make a living and just to amuse and enjoy ourselves!
Carl William Brown’s thesis about George Mikes and the humor phenomenon. This literary work constitutes a deep and very articulated essay on the humor themes and besides it results to be a vast panorama on the whole literary work of George Mikes, an author that has written up to 37 books which have sold million of copies all around the world. This new initiative of the Daimon Club and his founder intends to be a homage to the nice Hungarian author that wrote in English, and wants to be an ulterior stimulus for all those people who are interested in this mysterious subject.
This dissertation is substantially a bilingual text, even if unfortunately its main structure is in Italian. Anyway the English readers can taste all George Mikes’ literary passages, but of course if they don’t know the Italian language they will lose the critical discourse about the author and about the humor philosophy. And this is also the reason why we are going to offer the text to different publishers either Italians or not, in order to ask them to translate the whole work and put it on the world wide book market.
To make a good healthily laugh you can also visit the following pages!
