I was sitting there, idly watching the "Today" show yesterday morning, listening to one of the cast members of the show "The Office" talk about how pain is the new funny. First of all, it would go a long way towards explaining why I positively loathe shows like "The Office" in particular, and TV in general; pain has nothing to do with funny, and if it does, it's because we have so inured ourselves to it as a society that this has become the state of things. Pain is pain, funny is funny, and for the most part, never the twain shall meet. I know for myself that I've had enough pain in real life to last me the rest of mine; if I want funny, as anyone who knows me will tell you, it tends to be more "theatre of the absurd" kind of humor. Gary Larson and Berke Breathed were comic idols of mine, as well as early George Carlin, and others, as I have previously noted. This, of course, is not to say that pain has no part in the making of humor, indelibly, it is at the root of everything from the Three Stooges through Looney Tunes onto guys like George Carlin and Sinbad. But it is essentially the "juice" that is squeezed out of pain that makes great humor, not the pain itself. When you tell yourself you can either laugh or cry in any given situation, and you choose to laugh. Note the use of the word choose. This matters. Someone taking a real arrow through the skull is a storyline for "ER," I doubt very seriously that even "M*A*S*H," the mother of all medical comedies, could have yukked up something like that. If you know the arrow through the skull isn't real, that's a Steve Martin bit. It's that twist into the surreal that can ultimately make something hilarious; the doubt that anyone was actually harmed. That's pretty much what makes cartoons such a hoot, everything from Looney Tunes to Spongebob. We all know no real damage was done. And, of course, there's gender differences with regard to what is perceived as funny. The Three Stooges is just not a woman's brand of humor, any more than "The Office" or "Two and a Half Men" is my kind of funny; it just hits too damned close to home, at least for me. And what kind of funny are we going to get from all the people who have been taking care of their aging parents, or live with their parents for no other reason than simple bad luck on their part? Would we ever see the funny in something like the Vietnam War, or the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina or Ike? Doubtful; there was just way too much real damage done to see that as funny. Will there be some kind of "real comedy renaissance," bringing us back to what really is funny because of its obvious absurdity? British and Canadian comedy is like that for me, I positively roared with laughter, for example, when I saw a Canadian Native American stand-up comic (there's a combination you don't come across every day, eh?!) doing a bit about his first-ever experience in a Catholic church, and his equating of the priest not so much to a spiritual leader as a "religious square-dance caller." (his words, not mine.) Anyone who has ever been to a traditional-style Catholic mass, and witnessed the ensuing calisthenics knows exactly why that was hilarious to me. And God help those not so indoctrinated growing up, it is positively cultish in its uniformity. And somehow simply hysterical from this perspective. So to those who haven't gotten the memo yet, no, pain is not "the new funny," at least in it's own right. You have to know how to put the right spin on it.