Professor Sean Wilkinson
English 100
3 September 2017
What’s So Funny?
Imagine you had a very hard day. You are so exhausted and frustrated from all the work and everything else that went wrong at the same time. Sometimes you feel like the universe is playing a game with you and put you under a lot of responsibilities simultaneously. To escape, for even just a few minutes, you turn on your device and read or watch something funny. After some time, you have to go back to your real life, but you feel a little better. You say to yourself, “OK. Let’s do this!” It’s that moment that the creator of the humorous article, show, or picture has reached his/her goal. He/she made your life a little better. It was like a beam of light into your dark day. In the sitcom Scrubs, one of the characters, John Dorian (JD), says, “Unfortunately, things around here don't always end as neat and tidy as they do on sitcoms […] And at times like that, it's always comforting …show more content…
In this kind of world, I want to know the news, but it can be so disturbing and bitter to my soul that I don’t feel strong enough to watch what is happening about people and the environment. In such cases, some shows, like Last Week Tonight with John Oliver or The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, try to inform society about events using humor. Most of these comedians are concerned about the worldwide issues, and they boldly do routines about problems using facts. John Oliver in one of his shows about climate change states, “You don’t need people’s opinions on a fact. You might as well have poll asking: Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?” We may not always agree with comedians’ thoughts about an issue, but we can grab the facts and judge the situation for ourselves while we enjoy the comedy. We laugh hearing bad news while nodding or shaking our