The topic of my essay was “Anti-Humor”, which is often considered to be a part of comedy and is frequently used by comedians for the purpose of plying their trade. In my essay however, what I have done is teach an audience that may be unfamiliar with Anti-Humor as a whole both the importance of the genre and the fact that it is not technically comedy because it lacks comedy’s main element, humor. To present this fact, I used several examples of Anti-Humor and posed the philosophical argument that comedy’s principle element of humor is not present in Anti-Humor and, therefore, that Anti-Humor has no intrinsic value. This means that it must derive laughter from another source, man himself. He will laugh out of sheer confusion or discomfort when he realizes that the punchline he was expecting isn’t there. I concluded by stating that Anti-Humor was an important tool for understanding the human coping mechanism of laughter which is often triggered by horrible and uncomfortable things.

I wrote this paper by starting with a free write. This free writing/thinking, would eventually lead to an idea, which then rapidly led to a first draft. Knowing that this first draft was terrible, I waited for feedback on it so that I could better determine what was wrong with it. Once all problems were identified in their entirety, I began to apply the fixes in places that I deemed appropriate which produced another draft and then a final product worthy of a solid grade.

Over the course of my essay drafting, I have come to learn how to better use language to reach the audience and to do so more concisely. I have also worked on improving my treatment of the audience a bit (in the beginning I was referring to certain people unfamiliar with the genre as “unwitting saps”, which I realize might not go over well from a communication standpoint).

I have also learned to get the point across at the right times which has helped me to better organize my thoughts within each paragraph which has improved the structure of the paper. I still need to work on my proofreading and revising however, as I have missed some obvious grammar errors that I must be able to catch before each final paper. On the whole however, I have done well with this assignment and have been very clear about the paper’s purpose, the meaning I intended to convey, and in communicating the message in its entirety without creating filler.

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