Comedy is the Opposite of Poetry

poetry is a destructive force

A lot of people write poetry in their blogs. I don’t read any of them. I don’t read poems at all. It is because I find most of the poems to be incomprehensible, kind of inexplicable, sort of unclear, very unintelligible, sometimes dark and pretty obscure, often puzzling, lost or may be missed.

The problem with poetry lies not in the art but with the artist. It is the poet who wants to be perceived as enigmatic, unfathomable, complicated or lost (often in deep melancholy :p). Poetry is such a self-centered and narcissistic exercise.

The luxury poets have is that you (as the reader) do not understand the poem. You think you do, but you don’t for it is not meant to mean anything. The bigger luxury the poets have is that you are afraid to admit that you do not understand anything. And they exploit it and use it almost like a power that forces you into finding a meaning in something that was intentionally made to be meaningless. In a lot of ways it is no different than the symmetric inkblots psychologists use to experiment on you.

In this respect, comedy is in many ways the opposite of poetry. Comedy has to be approachable, comedy has to be clear and simple, comedy has to be succinct and more importantly, it has to be funny. Comedy has to be all of these in 30 seconds. Thirty seconds is all you have to make a joke.

The primary difference between comedy and poetry is that in poetry, the responsibility of entertainment is transferred back to the reader. Entertainment is a big responsibility, and the comedian has to carry it on his shoulders every thirty seconds.

And so poetry sucks.

P.S: Fans of poetry and amateur poets, you might want to defend your views.

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