Group activities and Spirit

I'm excited this morning because my Analog story is still "alive," even though it came out in May (in the July/August issue)... Rich Horton's year-end summary said it was a good story! Whee!

And speaking of cheering (yes, this is a segue)...

This week has been "Spirit Week" at my son's school. I guess you could also call it "get everybody to do strange things together week." In a four-day week we had pajama day, crazy hair day, Disney day, and school colors day. My son's been having a great time.

I remember doing this in my junior high and high school years. I loved it, too - even when I was generally feeling like the odd one out of most social groups.

There's something about doing things with other people. It feels good. It means something.

One of my most uplifting experiences ever was singing Mozart's Requiem with the university chorus when I was doing my Master's. I remember standing in the church and singing my guts out, but I also remember feeling almost as though I wasn't the one singing, that I was being borne up on the music and carried along, and that I could have sung forever. (This is of course not true, as I would have lost my voice before too long).

This is how I imagine the feeling of the House of Leaves in "Let the Word Take Me", where all the Gariniki are speaking and shouting out together.

My husband had an interesting experience concerning group activities when we were living in Japan. An American guy asked him how he could get along better with the Japanese members of the company, and my husband suggested he should 1. get drunk with them, 2. have a bath with them, and/or 3. sing karaoke with them. There's that singing thing again, but in the case of karaoke, it's not a question of joining your voice to the great song. Karaoke is all about expressing a joint willingness to humiliate yourself - and there's also a trust that comes with it, that no one will make fun of anyone else later. When another American fellow in the office went out for the first time for karaoke, the word that he was cool took about five minutes to run through the entire office the following morning, and suddenly even the people who hadn't been there felt better able to relate to him.

I'll talk about the bath thing tomorrow - it's just too wonderful a topic not to give it its own entry.

Group activities really help to define the nature of social groups. My husband has never experienced a "spirit week" before; his schools always had competition by House to help organize group spirit. For all those of us who have read Harry Potter, that should sound awfully familiar! Hogwarts wouldn't be Hogwarts without it.

So let's think for a minute about worldbuilding, since I always do. You've got a population, now how do you let everyone know what they're like? This is a great opportunity for "show don't tell": either dramatize, or make reference to, a type of group activity that is highly indicative of their spirit in social behavior. Is it attending sports? Is it watching gladiators fight to the death? Is it going to church? Is it eating together with the members of the nuclear family - or with all the members of the extended family? Is it shapeshifters melting together into the "Great Link" as it was in Star Trek DS9?

Ask yourself how a group defines itself, what its members do together, and what those activities mean to them. You'll take yourself instantly beyond the surface level, into a much more interesting place.

The Pitfalls of Humor

I couldn't blog last night because I was out - watching the taping of the NPR radio quiz show called "Wait, wait... Don't tell me."  My husband loves this show, so we often hear it on Saturday mornings.  It's full of political humor and quirky stories from the week's news.  I laughed so hard my face hurt - but I wonder if someone from a different culture or country might have enjoyed it quite as much.

Humor doesn't translate well.

I admit I laugh at "Wait, wait... Don't tell me."  And Jon Stewart gives me quite the chuckles.  The hardest I've ever laughed was at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Monty Python - English humor.  Some of the jokes, of course, went right by me.  They didn't make me groan, but instead made me go, "Wha...?"  The ones that got me, on the other hand - whoa!  Monty Python's parrot sketch brought tears to my eyes.

I think a lot of humor is like that, because if humor didn't tread borderlines, it wouldn't be funny.  My preference is for humor along the random/weird borderline, because if I don't get it, it just leaves me behind.  I laugh at some types of uncomfortable/taboo borderline humor, but when I don't get it, I can hardly stand it.  With Mr. Bean, for example, I have to leave the room after about five minutes - same with Mike Myers at his worst.  Profanity generally leaves me cold, but it "fits" well with certain types of humorous content.  Seinfeld was always firmly on the borderline of inanity/pet peeves, and I couldn't stand it.

But in English generally, even if I don't "get" the humor, at least I understand what it's trying to do.  Humor in a foreign language is much tougher.  

French humor was always a rewarding effort for me.  I thought Asterix and Tintin comic books were hilarious - Tintin went more for the physical slapstick humor that was relatively familiar, while Asterix added a dimension of puns that is difficult to describe.  I think puns in English are often considered to be low humor, though they are used constantly in the area of sports, and often in news headlines.  The puns in Asterix were so thoroughgoing that you just had to love them.  And the cultural borderlines they played with were somewhat familiar. 

Japanese is harder.  I've studied a heck of a lot of Japanese, lived there three years, watched a lot of Japanese television shows, and I have yet to get it completely.  Some stuff I've figured out.  The physical humor - I can understand the ridiculing/embarrassing/fooling/injuring people borderline to some extent.  It was a little like America's most sadistic home videos.  The humor satirizing extreme elements of Japanese culture, I could also get - like a sitcom-style show that depicted a number of families going to extreme measures as their children passed through rigorous testing to enter kindergarten.  Or like Juzo Itami's The Funeral - a great movie - which satirized the societal expectations of behavior surrounding a funeral for a man whom everyone in the film disliked.  But some of it, especially comedy-dialogue, left me totally bewildered.

So what about in writing stories?

Well, as I've told all my critique friends, I can't write humor.  Not jokes, at least.  So I don't try to go for ridiculous situations or funny twists or wild over-the-top comedy.  On the other hand, I love to have my characters be funny just because of who they are.  Like the gecko Allayo in Let The Word Take Me (Analog, July/August 2008), who because of her cultural background drew the utterly serious and sensible conclusion that the young Human man David Linden was possessed, simply because he talked so much. 

When I started writing this post it made me wonder what an alien or fantasy society would look like if it were designed with its own particular brand of humor.  I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone do something like that - not having the entire story be a comedy, so much as having the people in it make humor an important and integral part of their lives.  If any of you have encountered such a thing, do tell me where, because I'd love to see how it was done!