Welcome to Douglas Wilson's The Plodcast, presented don't never.

Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 229. I'm Douglas Wilflin and I'm very glad you decided to join us here.

I want to talk a little bit today about how humor is a deadly weapon.

Humor is a deadly weapon.

Of course, humor is a fun entertaining sort of thing

when you're telling stories around a campfire or when the family is when you're having a meal and the meal between dinner and dessert the family members start to tell them stories about camping escapades or escapades

when the kids were little and so forth.

And everybody's just laughing and having a good time about this that or the other thing. Well that there the

humor is not weaponized. There the humor is not weaponized. But this is an

important thing. One of the principles of war is surprise. And I would argue that the essential element in humor itself, even in the non-combative forms of humor, like when a family is telling stories or when someone's telling a joke,

the thing that makes humor work is surprise.

And I think this begins very early. So think of the first time

you made a baby laugh out loud simply by putting a cloth in front of your face and pulling it away.

So it's the element of surprise there is funny.

Surprise is funny.

I'm expecting one thing I'm going along, going along, going along,

and then something different happens

something surprising happens. Now if you are surprised one response to that

surprise is laughter. The other response to that surprise is

horror. So if you let's say you saw space aliens landing in your city center and blowing up buildings,

you would be surprised, presumably, you'd be surprised, and also frightened, filled with horror horror the surprise that you feel is

entirely a negative reaction okay it's entirely a negative reaction and if you are sitting around telling stories and someone sets up the joke

...