An Exercise
A baby flipping the bird.
Consider that image: a baby, probably making some adorable face, holding his hand out at a weird baby-angle, with his middle finger extended.
You’ve seen that image before, probably in an e-mail forward from a relative — your mom, your grandparents, your loathsome uncle — with a subject line that read “Fwd: Cool Kid!” or something equally banal. As you should have noticed at the time, it wasn’t funny.
Of course, it wasn’t really meant to be funny. The arrangement of the baby’s fingers was almost certainly accidental, as was the photographer’s timing when the picture was originally taken. Accidents and coincidences can sometimes expose larger truths about those involved, or about the world in general (often to humorous effect), but not in this case.
What we have, then, is effectively a picture of absolutely nothing happening. This places it lower on the Great Comedy Totem Pole than such gems as “dog humps tortoise,” “two guys moving furniture but it looks like they might be doing something gay,” and “tortoise humps suitcase.”
None of this is to say that the image of a baby flipping the bird can never be funny. It can reveal much about the person observing it, and that can be hilarious when it’s not horribly depressing. It can remind you that in a few short years the child will be shouting, “Fuck you, Dad!” every chance he gets.
But the mere fact that it happened (and not really; see above) isn’t enough, so maybe try not to be the sort of asshole who laughs at that.
