McKenna's Laughter Blog

To preface this entire post, I'd like to say that I really don't watch movies. I'm very busy, and I find the idea of having to sit for 2-3 hours to a watch a movie that's probably not even that good a little daunting. I'm also an avid reader, so I'd much prefer to read in my free time than watch movies. In looking at internet lists of the top comedies, I just really haven't seen enough of them to pass judgement. That being said, here is my top comedies list: 1. She's the Man (also my favorite movie of all time) 2. Pitch Perfect (my second favorite movie of all time) 3. Napoleon Dynamite 4. 21 Jump Street 5. The Heat As far as the silent comedy compilations, they weren't my favorite, but I did find humor in them. As new age as it sounds, I strongly dislike watching both black and white AND silent films, so I could never watch an entire comedic film from the early 20th century. I will, however, list here my favorite scene from each of the actor ...

Here's a selfie (after 10 hours in the car )with my favorite author Toni Morrison.

My first uncontrollable laughter episode for the second half of the semester happened last night. I just got a new ear piercing, and ever since then, my boyfriend, Matt, and I have been arguing about the best way to pierce an ear at home. I say that it’s more common to use a sterilized needle and an apple, while he says it’s better to use a potato rather than apple. I honestly could not tell you how or why we came upon this subject yesterday night, but this time, instead of arguing for either a potato or an apple, we each came up with more and more ludicrous things one could use to pierce an ear besides a nail and either a potato or an apple. Below is a short list of some of the options we had (in order of ludocrity): A Samurai sword and a peach A rusty nail and a pineapple A chef’s knife and a grape A dull butter knife and an artichoke A twig and a carrot A sharpened fingernail and celery A cursed dagger and my ex’s still beating heart A cactus and my left hand (the cactus bei...

For this blog I’m going to reflect, for myself, on how my semester is going thus far. The semester started out pretty slow for me – I didn’t have much reading for the first few weeks, and even when the reading started, I didn’t have much else. It seemed like I was missing something because I was always ahead on work which never happens. Don’t get me wrong, I always do my homework, but it’s almost never done earlier than the night before. This first month of bliss was great and I felt on top of the world (not to be dramatic about it or anything)! Fast forward to when the papers and tests started coming – it really wasn’t that bad either. This semester I switched around what normally is my schedule (i.e. class in the morning and work in the afternoon to work in the morning and class in the afternoon), and it seemed to be working better. I’m most productive in the morning, so I did all my homework at work usually 1-2 days in advance. Usually by the time I get to class I’m pretty tired and...

I would like to take this post to give a shoutout to moms. Moms are great. They are all different, but they are the kind of people that give me hope in humanity. They have an extremely high capacity for empathy, and I am more grateful for that everyday. I have many interactions with moms (most notably my mom and my friends’ moms), and I had a great one this past weekend. Last Friday I drove down to San Antonio to attend the finals of the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo with my best friend from England, Chennya, and her boyfriend, Jarrod (both of whom I work with at summer camp). We three stayed with Jarrod’s mom who lives outside of San Antonio in a little southern town called Gonzalez. It was the most stereotypical small southern town I’ve ever spent a chunk of time in, and Jarrod’s mom Paige made my stay significantly better. Since Chennya and Jarrod are both good friends of mine, I am often their third wheel as I was this weekend, and Paige made this weekend’s third wheeling so muc...

I wouldn’t consider myself a YouTuber and I don’t often go on YouTube, but yesterday I was curled up in my bed for my sick day and fell into the trap. I started on Twitter, but decided to reminisce upon the wonderful days of Vine (pre-Tik Tok). There are many Vine compilations on YouTube, and yesterday I picked the one entitled “Vines That Keep Me From Ending It All.” Yes, the title is a little sinister, but it’s a great video. While I was watching this 14-minute video, there were more than a few times I broke out into uncontrollable laughter. What makes this laughter session different from others, specifically, is that I was alone in my room. I didn’t have anyone to laugh with or at, but I was still literally LOLing. For the rest of this post I’m going to describe a few of my favorite Vines from the video and try to understand why I laugh so hard at them. My all time favorite Vine is a guy driving a car who passes a “Road Work Ahead” sign and says “Road Work Ahead? Uh, yeah I sure ho...

"It cannot be denied that in the long run laughter and reason and nature have mastered every single one of these great teachers of an aim. In the end, the brief tragedy always turned back into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter,’ to use Aeschylus’ expression, must finally crash over even the greatest of these tragedians. But despite all this corrective laughing, human nature has nevertheless been changed, on the whole, by this constant reappearance of these teachers of aim of existence... The most careful friend of humanity will add, ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom, but also the tragic with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of preserving the species!’" Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science.” Existentialism: Basic Writings, edited by Charles B. Guignon and Derk Pereboom, Second ed., Hackett, 2001, pp. 131.  This quote is a small part of the longer work by Friedrich Nietzsche entitled The Gay Science ...