Similar to last week’s Rose Cafe, we discussed the similarities and differences of two words.  For this talk, it was comedy and tragedy.  Interestingly he chose to define comedy as walking the fine line between acceptable and upsetting.  He also told stories of his grandfather, which opened the talk in a light way and also made the talk feel more like a conversation than a lecture.

I was most interested in the fact that the topic of the talk was “environmental humor” and he talked about his upbringing, religion, and the definition of comedy.  It all seemed to come together when he started showing the clips.  He incorporated a clip that contained jokes about the apocalypse with jokes about religion that showed the pragmatic humor the Jewish people held in relation to Christians.  He was able to incorporate his book idea with the idea that while tragedy brings people together their tends to be more judgement.  He was able to incorporate so many ideas into an engaging and entertaining talk.  I was surprised to hear him talk about laughing at oneself and say that environmentalists did not laugh at themselves as it was interesting to think that perhaps certain ideas lead to more laughing at yourself than others.  This was then transitioned into a humorous clip about environmentalists’ self interest.  Environmentalists get made fun of most because they are not working for a group of people and do not make fun of themselves.  As a animal science major, and huge animal lover, I totally get where this is coming from.  I will make fun of other human issues but never an animal or animal issues.  I prefer animals to people so I, to a certain extent, feel the same way that the people in the clip about wolves felt.