This is not a Very Good Title

This is a meta-thought.

There's a huge wave of humor that has been cresting for the last decade or so. It started coming in and out of popular fashion in the 1960s when Monty Python burst onto the scene. For the first time, comedy was not about normal people in strange situations ( e.g. I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke) but about strange people in normal situations. So much of humor afterward has been an attempt at blending the two. The wave that I mentioned is one of meta-humor - specifically, jokes about humor. About the crafting of humor. Jokes about jokes. About set ups, about punch lines, about why we make them.

In a mild sense of what meta-humor is, it could be described as self-aware. This happens in almost all other mediums of art:

A novel written about a novel writer. Self-portraits. Songs with lyrics about writing songs. I'll go one step further:

A novel written about the process of writing that particular novel. A self-portrait of the artist as he paints the self-portrait. Songs with lyrics about the song that they are in. These are the standards of post-modern art. Self-reflection. Self-awareness.

The "joke" part of the joke is usually the punch-line. The ending. The reason for telling the story. One of my favorite versions of meta-humor is the Shaggy Dog Story. It can be any story that is incredibly dull, that shoots off into tangents, that has no point. It's all in the mastery of telling it. The joke is not the joke itself, but the way the joke is told - and eventually, the joke becomes the audience, the fact that they are still listening intently waiting for a joke that will never come.

Here's where I need you to follow me a bit. Just for a little while.

Have you ever met someone who spoke about reading the Bible as if it were some great achievement? As if they'd climbed Everest by slogging through to Revelation? Like he's dashed himself upon the very rocks of literary challenge to sit down for a few hours a night? It's pretty absurd to think about. It's, after all, just a book. Just a few hundred pages to read. It's really not a difficult task to undertake. Yet there are programs that help people read the thing in a year. A year. Seriously. There is, to my knowledge, no such program for War and Peace, and it's longer.

So how many times have you read it?

(Imagine my haughty philosopher voice) In my philosophical training, I was forced to engage the ancients through their writing. To do so, we had to read and re-read what they wrote several times. One of the funniest things to me when someone learns my degree is in philosophy is when they ask if I've read such-and-such book. "Have you read Locke's Second Treatise?" In my head I'm thinking, "Yes. 8 times. And I've underlined 1/3 of it. And written in all the margins." I usually just nod my head.

The thing is, that most of us (definitely myself) don't re-read the things we need to. Just like our friend who thinks he's done because he's finished the Bible - we feel like we've assimilated the knowledge, and we can move on. The truth is, we need to return to writings from time to time to refresh our understanding of them. I went back and re-read some of my older thought emails, and (other than the spelling errors) I was actually surprised at what I was thinking or that I was thinking it. I even learned a few things from myself.

The same can be said, I think, about most personal writings. Journals, old term papers, letters and notes to friends, emails long forgotten. Remember that report you did on the heart in 5th grade? Can you tell me the chambers? Of course not. It was 87 years ago that you did that project, and you haven't gone back to relearn from it.

So (how's this for meta-analysis) I'm going to go back and revisit this very email and critique it. It's long winded. Rambling. It has some interesting facts about the history of American comedy that seem not at all relevant to the greater point of learning by returning to old knowledge. The transition to the part about the Bible is a little slapdash. The author seems to really think highly of his own opinion, though, and what's more troubling is that there's a critique of the email embedded in the email itself. Perhaps even more strange than that is the mention of the critique within the critique. A critique on the critique during the critique.

And now, some fun facts about this email:

1) Meta is the Greek word for "after", meaning that the first sentence of the email labels it as an "after thought". Thus, it is both the primary and secondary thought.

2) Because it's rambling, you have to wonder whether the email itself is a Shaggy Dog Story. Thus, making the readers, the joke. Plus, since the author is also a reader, the joke teller is also the joke.

3) Congratulations on making it this far.

4) There are at six Biblical references slyly hidden in the email. I'm just glad I'm not the Publican who seeks to find them all. Alright, that's seven. Or does the fact that there are seven references count as a reference itself? Thus making it eight references and negating the whole seven thing in the first place?

5) There is an inordinate amount of lists in this email. I would make a list of all the lists, but that would lead to infinite regression.

6) The true main point of it, is that we should all be incredibly self-aware.