Explaining a Joke

I just watched the Saturday Night Live episode from last week, the one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as host, and it was shit. The episode was so abysmal that it failed to give me more than the occasional nervous chuckle. The thing is, I know that SNL has its good episodes and its bad episodes, and it can go for years of figurative comedic "dry spells," but the show from November 21, 2009 was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's most disappointing to me that Saturday Night Live is supposed to be a magnet for talent - it draws in people from the best improv groups, sketch comedy teams, and standup acts in Chicago, LA, New York, and around the world to put out something entertaining on a weekly basis. These are the best and brightest minds in comedy, and their combined group of writers and performers had to recycle at least two sketches (perhaps in honor of NBC's pledge to be more green?) and keep rehashing 60s kitsch like they've been doing all season.

But what do I know? I'm a 24 year old kid still living with his mother, and I'm too chickenshit to take a class at the ImprovOlympic. Comedy is hard. Even so, I understand many of the fundamentals. For instance, there's the well-known principle of "Yes, and..." If somebody in an improvised sketch brings up a topic or declares a statment, you have to agree with the premise and add onto it. If a guy comes out holding something imaginary in his hands and says it's a pizza, you can't say, "No, that's a frisbee," because you're interrupting the flow of the joke and you're killing momentum. In a similar vein, I shouldn't be doing what I'm about to do. I'm going to explain a joke, and by doing so, I'm going to kill it.



This is the complex plane. It works similar to the Cartesian coordinate plane that most of us are familiar with from geometry class, except this uses the concept of complex numbers. Complex numbers, in turn, were invented because no one could figure out how to deal with the square roots of negative numbers. So, someone said that i=sqrt(-1), and now we have a whole system of numbers that can be represented by a + bi, where a and b are real numbers. The real numbers (1, 2, 3, 4) are on the axis going left to right, and the imaginary numbers (1i, 2i, 3i, 4i) are on the axis going up and down. On the grid, I've included a point which represents the complex number 2+3i. Now, we can create functions that take these values and produce an output, which can create graphs. For instance, the function f(z) = 3/z produces the following graph. Special thanks to Wolfram Alpha.



Notice how, at one point, the function turns into a funnel that increases to infinity? That's known as a pole, and it's a simple pole because of the way it was constructed (I won't get into the details unless you really want me to).

Do you want me to tell a joke now? Neither do I, but I got started already so here it goes. This is where I got the name for my blog, by the way. Our math teacher in Complex Analysis had gotten through explaining all of these concepts and said, "A man of the Polish persuasion got on a Boeing 767 for a routine flight back to the Motherland. He was getting comfortable in coach when a stewardess screamed out, 'The pilot and co-pilot are dead! Is there anyone left that can fly this aircraft?' The Polish man said, 'I was a pilot back in the war. Let me have a go at the controls.' So he bravely sauntered up to cockpit. When he opened the door, he was awestruck by the array of lights, dials, screens and switches in front of him, and he froze up. The stewardess shook him and said, 'Aren't you going to sit down and take the reins?' He said in a quavering voice, 'I'm just a simple Pole in a complex plane!'"

The class laughed, but don't feel bad if you didn't. I chose it as the name of my blog because it works on so many levels. I'm Polish, so my Polish heritage informs my outlook on life and the world. I love to travel internationally, so I'm frequently on planes. And despite my pedigrees and proficiencies, I still feel like a simpleton in a tortuous machine.