The first time I saw Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, I had already heard about most of the jokes from my geeky friends. Even though I thought it was a funny movie, there was one scene that had been so spoiled for me I could not find it amusing. Over time, my distaste for this scene has deepened into a kind of disgust, as shrill imitations of its shrill dialogue have superimposed each other in my memory, so that hearing one is like hearing all of them in grating chorus. I am, of course, talking about the Knights Who Say "Ni." Objectively, I can see how this was a funny idea: a group of knights will not allow King Arthur to pass unless he brings them a shrubbery, and they halt his progress by saying "ni." As a satire of Arthurian legend, it's definitely accurate; this ridiculous scenario is only a slight exaggeration of how these adventures typically play out in the source material. But I doubt that even Monty Python had any idea how this bit would take on a life of its own, or how one sound—presumably picked for being one of the most grating that could possibly be uttered by the human tongue—would become one of their most often imitated lines, until hearing it would make people like me react in much the same way King Arthur did in the movie. In other words: it bugs the hell out of me.
   But quoting funny moments from television and film does not always make me feel this way. There is, after all, The Simpsons. For three years, I have watched reruns at 6:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. every weeknight I'm home, which tends to be pretty often, until I have seen virtually every episode. But I still watch them again and again, and laugh at the same jokes every time. And I know I'm not alone on this. It's only a slight exaggeration to call The Simpsons the cultural currency of our generation, and assert that what Homer was to the Greeks the other Homer is to us: our point of reference. More often than seems healthy, I have been in conversations with people, many times hardly knowing them, and without anyone seeming to realize it we descend into a recitation of favorite lines and episodes. Mine is an episode where the Bumblebee Man, after complaining about his hard day of getting hit on the head in various ways, opens a cabinet that for some reason is full of oranges. The oranges fall out and hit him on the head, causing him to scream, "Ay, oranges en la cabeza!" But what is it about "oranges en la cabeza" that makes me chuckle no matter who says it, while "ni" only makes me shudder? Is my compulsion to imitate the Bumblebee Man any different from that of the giggling geeks who yell "ni!" at each other so incessantly? Or am I only making the distinction because I don't want to think of myself as a geek? Granted, I may not be the best person to ask this question; I am, after all, the guy who spent much of his uncertain youth memorizing entire comedic routines on Comedy Central, and who still lingers uncomfortably close to the line that distinguishes having a life from merely having cable. But whether I'm a geek or not, there does seem to be a level of television and film quotation that is socially acceptable, and it does seem to depend at least partially on what you quote. Indeed, considering how the television and film of recent years has become a tissue of pop-culture referentiality, quoting your favorite movies is virtually a prerequisite for hipness. But is there a distinction between cool quoting and not-cool quoting? If so, what is it?
   For the sake of argument, I'm going to suggest that the maturity of subject matter is the salient feature. And not "mature audiences" maturity, I mean the stuff that only real grown-ups get. After all, the terms "geek" or "nerd" really mean socially retarded, used to describe individuals whose sense of themselves as participants in society still lingers in developmental stages long after their peers have plunged into adulthood.
   Although The Simpsons began as the story of a fourth-grader, it's widely accepted that the show really found its legs when it began to focus on Homer, and eighty percent of the humor began sailing over the head of the average American. By contrast, whatever their intellectual sophistication, Monty Python are sketch comedians, a form that has found its most appreciative audience in middle-school kids. Not to say that adults do not enjoy sketch comedy, or that it is not "for" adults. But it is this very intention, combined with its exaggeration of every-day absurdities and generous use of physical humor, that makes it appeal to not-quite-boys/girls and not-yet-men/women. With adult themes like politics and sex, it gives them that insight into being a grown-up that makes them try cigarettes and read magazines, but jokes about flatulent Frenchmen and castles full of naked women don't exactly lose the audience with their complexity. While the same could be said of The Simpsons, sketch comedy is different in that absurdity is given absolute reign; at the peak of its run, the writers on The Simpsons never allowed their ridiculous characters to be completely unsympathetic, creating levels of commentary that require a certain emotional maturity to digest. By contrast, Holy Grail has virtually no sympathetic characters; the last act of the film is merely a succession of arbitrary dismissals until the fourth wall collapses and everything is over. Mostly inoffensive (or at least too strange to be very offensive), this kind of comedy provides a safe initiation into the concerns of adulthood, i.e. one that does not require interpretation; its only "message" is that adulthood is absurd.
   But interpretation is a prerequisite for adulthood. Adults test the boundaries of safe behavior for themselves and reinterpret the rules that hold society together; they don't dismiss those rules out of hand as being too complicated. Individual responsibility for interpretation is the central message of The Simpsons, enumerated by Matt Groening himself in Mother Jones magazine (as quoted in Salon): "Your moral authorities don't always have your best interests in mind.... Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians—for the Simpsons, they're all goofballs, and I think that's a great message for kids." While much of Monty Python's comedy takes similar shots at authority—most notably in The Life of Brian—the satire in Holy Grail is more aesthetic than political, more rarified than relevant, and it doesn't seem coincidental that it's also their most popular movie. And though both The Simpsons and Holy Grail are better appreciated if you're smart, more maturity is required to appreciate the former than the latter. For that reason, quoting the humor of The Simpsons implies a greater emotional maturity than does reciting dialogue from Holy Grail.
   But while this accounts for my observation that fans of The Simpsons are in general more socially successful than fans of Holy Grail, it does not address the larger issue of why fans of one crack me up with their quotations while fans of another piss me off. The argument that one is funnier than the other is not only impossible to make but global in implication: these are the biggest comedic institutions in England and America, and both enjoy huge followings on either side of the Atlantic. I might as well argue about Elvis or the Beatles. And even if I did address the comparison in all of its complexity, the result would ultimately be only my opinion. Truth be told, there are just as many nerds who like The Simpsons as who like Holy Grail; the argument that liking one more than the other means I'm cool is ultimately pointless. It does, however, highlight two questions that must be answered, namely: (1) what does it mean to be cool, and (2) what does it have to do with what I think is funny?
   To answer the first question, I'm going to stick with my analysis above, and contend that liking The Simpsons is cooler than liking Holy Grail because the former creates an empathy for its characters that registers most strongly with emotionally mature audiences. So does being cool mean having emotional maturity? This seems counterintuitive, considering that most of the coolest people (rock stars, poets, artists, actors) are man-children who languish in self-doubt and hedonism before dying young in some ludicrous fashion. Being cool, however, is a state based entirely on appearance; it does not require that anyone actually "be" anything, merely seem that way. After all, the cool kids were always the older kids, not necessarily mature but seeming mature to the younger kids. Cool people have the confidence in themselves to test their own limitations. And though that is the basic feature of adulthood, cool people tend to lack the self-awareness to recognize a limitation when they find one. In other words, they are unafraid—of what people will think, of the consequences of their actions, even of death itself.
   The lack of fear intrinsic to coolness is its feature that links it to humor. One theory for the evolutionary purpose of laughter is that it communicates to the rest of the group that an apparent threat is actually not threatening. If, for example, two cavemen are hunting sabretooth tigers and one is attacked, only to have the tiger impale itself on his spear, the caveman's laughter communicates to the other caveman that what seemed like a dangerous situation is not. This is why laughing in the face of death is so brave, and why politicians fear ridicule more than scandal; the things that we find funny should seem frightening, but seem instead to have no power over us. A person's sense of humor is defined by what he or she perceives of as a threat—not the sum, but the inverse of all fears. As such, your sense of humor is an indicator of what you fear: if you're afraid of nothing, everything is funny.
   The question, though, is how funny. The greater the perceived threat, the more amusing the joke when that threat is deflated. This is what people mean when they say a joke is "charged." The difficulty of comedy is maintaining this charge without going too far. If the deflation does not succeed and the perception of threat remains, your audience is offended; as something worthy of fear and therefore respect, the subject of your joke is "serious," attempting to deflate it "inappropriate." On the other hand, if you pick an easy target for deflation, the joke isn't very funny. Because being cool is equivalent to not feeling threatened, the cool sense of humor is more tolerant of "offensive" humor than society at large—although fewer things seem very funny. The perfectly cool person would be a latter-day Buddha, smiling at everything, but too sedate for belly laughter.
   By contrast, nerdy humor is characterized by the near-seizures of chortling it produces, usually over absurdities with only a loose connection to present-day reality. You can hardly find a safer target than medieval literature, albeit only because time has made it so remote. But humor implicitly commenting on a social order that has only a distant connection to modern America should not seem charged in our current context. It can only seem that way to an overactive imagination, for which an imagined or historical social context can seem as real as its possessor's actual life. This kind of imagination requires a radical disassociation from that actual life, a state that is literally the antithesis of cool. Coolness is taking the offensive against reality, pushing it aside if it interferes, but certainly not forgetting that it's there; by contrast, nerdy humor is symptomatic of a full retreat.
   The issue, then, is not that the Knights who say "Ni" aren't funny; they just aren't that funny. A satire of medieval literary conventions is not as fraught with implication as a satire of Latin-American physical comedy. Simpsons characters like the Bumblebee Man are funny not only because they're wacky, but also because they personify the problems of cultural imperialism, as America's Mr. Sparkle descends on the world, transforming other nations from the pretty girls of cultural autonomy into the Sumo wresters of economic dependency. Join us or die; can they do any less? And I won't even get into other issues like racial tension and the portrayal of ethnic minorities, just a little further under the surface. Suffice to say that, unlike Holy Grail, The Simpsons offers humor that, if only providing relief from the problems of our modern world, at least does so by addressing them head-on. Dwelling on quotes from a show like this is akin to dwelling on an item in the news or the salient observation of a commentator. It is a use of the media as the plural of "medium" it used to be: intermediaries that allow us to process the complexities of our world. By contrast, shouting "Ni!" is inarticulate in every sense, the echo of an absurdist satire of a dead form, the empty signifier of an empty signifier. Instead of meaning, this pointless recitation is its inverse, a symptom of arrested development and alienation from the rest of humanity.
   So when is it not cool to quote movies and television? Duh, whenever the person quoting them is not cool. Like the car you drive and the clothes you wear, the pop culture you reference does not determine your coolness, but is determined by it. Taste is the product of a mindset, particularly taste in humor; you can't decide to get a joke any more than you can decide to change your sexual orientation or religious beliefs. But, also like these things, your understanding of what you find funny is linked to your confidence and willingness to examine yourself. While people talk about observational humor, there isn't really any other kind; if you're going to get a joke about how ridiculous people are, you first have to understand why they are so ridiculous, and the only way to do that is to interact with them on a regular basis. Thus, if "Ni"-quoters piss me off, it's really because they exhibit a tendency to supplement art for real life that, frankly, hits a little too close to home. (I mean, if it didn't, would I really be writing this article?) But if we are going to use quotes from our favorite films and shows to make people laugh instead of smile politely, we will have to be brave like Sir Robin, and sink into the ocean of social interaction like the very small rocks that we are. May the schwartz be with us, everyone.

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