Laughing At You

Not With You

This will be entry #1 in the Great Principles section.

From The Onion AV Club interview with Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, among other things:

part of the inspiration for both Beavis And Butt-Head and [a weird character from King of the Hill] was from my first engineering job. There was this guy who was a draftsman who thought that any time he worked the number 69 into something, it was automatically funny. He talked like Cheech Marin. He'd say stuff like, "Well, 69 percent of the time" or "Six to nine times out of 10," and he thought it was funny every single time. To me, that's funny, not because I think 69 is funny, but because that guy thinks that every time he says "69," it constitutes a joke.

There it is folks. The whole reason why Beavis and Butthead was a great show: it wasn't funny, it was funny that they thought it was funny.