These Sports Are(n’t) Funny
By: J.P. Melkus
Tags: Formula 1, Soccer, Humor, Sports, Baseball

The Unfunny Sports

Formula One

Without a doubt, the least funny sport is Formula One racing, or, as it is known in America: …? (It isn’t known in America. I am even explaining the joke to further illustrate how unfunny Formula One is.)

(Fascinating in a way that NASCAR and auto racing in other contexts can be funny (see above) but Formula One can be the anti-humor. But there you have it.)

Formula One has it origins in the earliest parts of the 20th century, but it didn’t become the organized series we (don’t) know today until after WWII, when it became one of several ways for Europeans to channel their nationalism into something that doesn’t result in the deaths of 125 million people. See?

As if it weren’t funny enough, the sport is plutocratic, utterly flooded with corporate money, hopelessly corrupt, elitist, and is plagued by byzantine rules and insurmountable costs of entry. If that weren’t enough, it also has a general lack of real competition, suffers from a small field, and turns a blind eye to human rights abuses by holding events in Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.

And almost worse than all that, it is completely dominated by a Mercedes team that has won the past three constructors championships in a row and regularly dominates the vast majority of races in any given season by and through its driver, the indefatigable and terribly boring corporate-shill android, Lewis Hamilton. Hay-O!

It has also played host to several spectacular crashes that have killed dozens of its own drivers and spectators over the years. (See Niki Lauda’s burnt up face, and the burned up bodies of James Hunt, Ayrton Senna, et al.) Ha ha!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one… I mean STOP ME! (Not funny. Just like Formula One.)

Modern races are affairs of drudgery, featuring pitifully few passes and duels, offering only hour after hour of screaming engines and precise, mechanical, automatons guiding things around. It’s a loud version of watching twelve people racing chess pieces from one end of the board to the other, and back, for three hours. [*rimshot*]

And finally, just because the sport was absolutely awesome from the ’70s through the early ’90s doesn’t mean it’s funny.

Proof: There is not a single (intentionally) funny movie about Formula One. There are good ones (e.g., Senna, Rush, the dozens of documentaries about the history and glory days of Formula One) but they are only sad or interesting.

OK, this looks a little funny. (Photo by Keith Johnston on Unsplash)

College Football

Let’s just point out the elephant in the room: The sport exploits a talent base that is largely composed of men of color from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds, paying them the equivalent of $40,000 a year or so (In tuition and room and board. I’m not counting free gear and plane or bus rides to Madison, Wisconsin or Manhattan, Kansas and an occasional trip to Miami.) to place themselves at great risk of physical injury for an approximate 3% chance to play maybe a year in the pros (where the vast majority will not play more than a season or two for the rookie minimum) all while generating millions for the 20–30 top college football programs in the country and billions for the networks that televise the games. It is to laugh.

But it’s also insufferably full of itself. You can’t get through a game without announcers, coaches, athletics directors, fans, the PA system, and the Dr. Pepper guy celebrating the “pageantry” and the “spectacle” of college football. We get it, there are flags and a band and an old stadium. Yuks for days.

Then there’s the arcane lore. It is too much to take. Even for a dedicated fan (like myself) you have to be raised in the game to be considered a fan, by the fans. It is nearly a cult. Did you not know that Nebraska’s overtime victory over Penn State in 2013 was an act of DIVINE recompense for Penn State’s 1982 win over Nebraska (that was made possible by an egregious out-of-bounds no-call)? No? Remember Wide Right I? II? III? IV? Well, why do you even watch the games then?

Yet it is the greatest, purest, best sport played in America today. It’s just not funny.

Proof: I could not find any funny pictures of college football. At all. Also, The Waterboy and Necessary Roughness are the only college football movies that even try to be funny.

The only way college football is even halfway funny is when you’re making fun of its fans, as here: