Ultimate Geek Fu

[Note: I know this isn't what you were hoping to see this morning, but I actually wrote it last week.]

 
The Difference Between Humor and Odor

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There's an old joke. (There must be new jokes somewhere, but they're very rare.*) It goes like this: "What's the difference between humor and odor?"

"Humor is a shift of wit."

As last week's discussion of SNL alumni movies illustrates so clearly, nothing is as subjective and strongly polarizing as humor. It's not merely the meat/poison dichotomy; when it comes to comedy, one man's meat is another man's open-faced crap sandwich with extra crap on the side.

As a writer, I also want to point out that nothing is as hard to write as good comedy. There's another old saying, this time from the theater: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." (This quote is variously attributed to so many people that I gave up trying to find a definitive source.) Drama, romance, tragedy, pathos, horror, action, adventure; all the rest of these, you can get it only half-right and still sort of succeed. But a poorly written or poorly delivered joke just thuds on the boards like a little leaden fart and sits there, stinking up the place, until someone or something else comes along to scoop it up and take it away.

So this week, let's not talk about unsuccessful comedies. There are way too many of those, and not time enough left before the end of the universe to catalog them all. Instead, I want your pick for the most underrated or unfairly ignored comedy movie or TV series; the one you try to get your friends to watch and always end up saying, "Really, it's much better than you think it is."

My pick is that one-of-a-kind Schwarzenegger movie, The Last Action Hero.

Let the arguments begin.

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ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue.

* P.S. Despite all the effort we put into denigrating "potty humor," the world's oldest known joke is a fart joke, of course.