Things that aren't as inherently funny as you might expect them to be

A list of things that seem to have inherent humor but instead are heavily contingent on the situation.

-John Goodman
-Shaq
-Carrie Anne-Moss

Anyway I hope to light a flame that will not die
to explain why
I
support Shaq and his Cavaliers.  but not in the NBA fi-
nals.  The logic is simple, the reasoning almost insulting.

You see, the Magic are a godly force in the East.  They have hundreds of players, manifold stables of guards, and millions of centers.  There are a million Dwight Howards housed in the Florida area.  Every public appearance he has made was made by a different Dwight Howard.  But with all of this depth in the line-up, I get a sort of...sense of what should not be. Not Satan, nor any of the demons invented by man.  But Lovecraft comes close.


In topology, we can map a line to a curve.  When we draw a line on a piece of paper, and bend and fold the paper, we get a curve.  If we draw a piece of paper on a piece of paper, and bend and fold the actual paper, the drawn piece of paper sort of bends and folds too.  Now, the world is sort of like a drawn piece of paper drawn on the universe that is an actual piece of paper.  When the universe bends, so does the world.  Suddenly, 20 feet above you is some village in China, upside-down, but they don't think it's upside-down.  But you're in Texas, or somewhere otherwise far distant from China.  What happened?  The universe probably bent.  Sometimes it does that.  You could walk the normal way to China, but you're better off jumping to China instead now.  Course, it could bend back any moment.  Of course, if you have a basketball team and some people from China are right above you, and one of them's Chinese player that can dunk, one of your players can attach a rope to his leg and he and the Chinese player can jump up/down at each other and grab onto each other's outstretched arms to bring that Chinese player to your team.  20 feet is just the equivalent of a standard dunk, if both "dunk" at the same time.

Similarly, our world is nothing if not in time.  In fact, you could also say that the world is a line drawn on the piece of paper that represents time.  Bending this piece of paper around and then pushing it through itself makes loops in the world like a roller coaster.  And one day you wake up and right above you, 20 foot above your bedroom, is the future.  And if you are a basketball team, you can grab a copy of yourself from the future.  So, for 3 years the Magic have been stockpiling copies of themselves, and because of a lot of complicated reasons, they have an infinite supply of themselves.  And, don't tell anyone, but they're starting to rename themselves and go to other teams.  Could David Stern, benevolent overseer of this great league, ever permit such an evil force to seek shelter in his organization?  I think not.  Therefore, I know that he has somehow poisoned the clones, so that when they get to the playoffs they will just be kind of off their game and barely stumble to the second round where the Celtics will make short work of them.

Now, I don't know what forces, what creatures as big as planets, what drawings inhabit the sheet of paper that is all existence.  I do know that our piece of paper is tightly glued to a firm posterboard of reason, and that any temporary act of magic will be offset by the Berrisphere that brings hope - hope through relentless predictability.