For my term project, I've been trying to film the most uninteresting videos fathomable. I will post them to YouTube, and then see if anyone watches them. The point of this project is to test just how far the "long tail" goes. However, as I have been creating it, this project has raised some interesting questions about the relation between boredom and humor.
I've been trying to make a video that is so boring that no-one would ever watch it. But as I've been filming the most uninteresting subjects imaginable, I'm either bored to tears or cracking up. And I've started to realize how strange each of these reactions actually are. Let me explain.
One of the videos that I filmed was of a plant doing nothing for three minutes. By about minute 1.5, the camera was shaking because I was starting to laugh. What I was doing seemed so ridiculous – I was filming a stationary plant--that I couldn't help at least chuckling. In a Monty-Python-esqu way, what I was doing seemed so random and improbable that it was hilarious to me.
However, I wonder why my natural reaction to something like a three minutes video of a plant is to laugh. Why is that funny? I guess on that subject, when you think about it logically, one might wonder why anything at all is funny. It almost seemed like because my mind was not being entertained by anything, it decided to avoid boredom by laughing at it. It also seems like it is a cultural reaction to laugh. By cultural, I don't mean "western" culture or any other pompous generalizations, but it might just be a piece college culture or Pomona culture to laugh at something that is incongruous.
However, at the same time, after finding it funny, I was impressed at how quickly I became bored. All it took to completely bore my mind was to watch the plant for another minute.
So I beginning to wonder about why it seems like I, or we, need to be entertained by something at all times. All it took to bore me was two minutes without some kind of stream of information to my mind. I am awake for 16 hours a day, that's almost a thousand minutes, and all it took was two of them without some sort of entertainment or challenging task for me to get restless. I wonder if humans have always been this easily "unamused," or if it is more specific to our hyper mediated environment.