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Comedy Theory (2022)
- harryf 2y agoRan into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach
- ixxie 2y agoAlmost reinvented the Benign Violation Theory: https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/ https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/
- fire_lake 2y agoWriting jokes was once considered an “AGI level” task - but after reading this I’m not so sure!
- iimaginary 2y agoA man swears he discovered the secret formula to satire. Turns out, it’s just one cup of irony and a lack of self-awareness, baked at 350 for 20 minutes.
- klar120 2y agoThis is exclusively the most primitive joke category base on double meanings. The jokes listed are boring and maybe suited for fillers in a standup routine. Due to the title I presume that this is another pro-"AI" article that devalues human ingenuity. Well, enjoy the non-funny jokes. I'll stick to pre-2022 material.
- seanhunter 2y agoThe jokes in the article are just there to demonstrate the pattern. There are lots of more sophisticated jokes which clearly follow the same pattern. For example Milton Jones' classic (which won "best joke" at the edinburgh comedy festival I believe) I come from a long line of police marksmen. Apart from my grandfather, who was a bank robber. But he died recently..... surrounded by his family. More Milton Jones "grandfather" jokes which all clearly demonstrate this pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUfbSrpsHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEUfbSrpsHk
- badjoak 2y agoI came from a long line of police marksmen. They serve good coffee next to the shooting range.
- badjoak 2y agoI came from a long line of police marksmen. We just won the precinct charity cancan dance competition.
- Freak_NL 2y agoThe ten best-voted one-liners from this year's Fringe are listed here: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-simmons-ship-joke-named-funniest-of-edinburgh-fringe https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-s... A couple follow that pattern exactly, but some also bank on taking words literally for comic effect. > I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it. (Mark Simmons)
- mewpmewp2 2y agoBut these are really not that funny. Specifically because you imagine that this is what you get if you bruteforce those combinations. If someone comes up on the spot with this and wants to share, sure it might be funny and clever, but if a professional comedian does jokes likes this, it seems plain and irrelevant. Just something that was bruteforced together.
- akoboldfrying 2y agoWords with two meanings are just one type of shared aspect in their system. The "hunting cakes" joke was an example of using a shared aspect that isn't a word. (And while it didn't wow me on the page, I think it's the type of joke that a talented comic could make much funnier through their delivery.) I agree that most of the jokes were weak, but they basically have to use one-liners in order to give many quick examples, and nearly all one-liners I meet are bad. That said, I genuinely enjoyed the "step ladder" one.
- everdrive 2y agoI've yet to see a theory of comedy which actually addresses that there are multiple kinds of comedy: - Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever. - Epiphany humor -- the joke relies on some new thought, connection, or idea, and the "joke" is the leap your mind needs to make in order to comprehend the novel idea. eg. "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" In this case, you must take the familiar phrase "let you down [emotionally]" and realize the second meaning "elevators move up and down [physically]." - Story-based humor, which probably needs a better name, but is mostly what stand-up comedy is. Other kinds of humor can be mixed in here, but often the "joke" relies on something of a straw man -- setting up a character in the story where the audience can readily recognize that at least one character being related is a fool, and worthy to be laughed at. Often this is perspective-based, and is based around relating to the characters in the stand-up comedian's story. For instance, take Bill Burr's joke about women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1GY-yr-BM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1GY-yr-BM -- the "joke" here is mostly whether or not you agree with Bill's characterization of the situation. The joke is not universally funny, but relies on the audience's perspective. If you've never seen the world from the same perspective as Bill, the joke may not hit the mark, or might even seem rude. - Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists. - SNL humor. "What if an unusual or annoying thing happened?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE93xON8jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE93xON8jk - Social awkwardness humor / Dramatic irony. See all / most of Arrested Development.
- sweezyjeezy 2y agoI think "incongruity theory", that the article is alluding to, does actually apply to most of these. You're focusing on the context rather than the actual underlying mechanism driving the joke. e.g. the first one "bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny..." Consider that the incongruity of a comedian laying into someone verbally, compared to the way we're primed for them to talk in polite-society interactions, may be part of the reason why this works. Similarly example two - "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" - there is an incongruity in the usual usage of the expression 'they'll never let you down' to here, that could be what makes this work as a joke. I agree there are examples that incongruity doesn't cover, e.g. slapstick I personally believe is something a bit different, but generally I do think it's a pretty compelling explanation for a lot of modern comedy.
- lupusreal 2y agoIs there a theory of humor which explains why theories of humor are invariably hilariously inadaquate?
- 082349872349872 2y agoSome activities are highly theoretical: you learn the principles of operation, and maybe how they break down into elements, practice briefly, and then execute at a high level. Other activities are highly practical: you can learn the theory via a brief rundown, but executing at a high level takes years to decades of practice. My theory of theory of humour is that humour is in the latter category.
- namaria 2y agoMost likely humor is just not one thing but many and seeking a unifying theory about something that isn't a unity won't yield anything.
- lee-rhapsody 2y agoThis is the most useful comment in the whole thread.
- RhysU 2y agoNo, any consist theory of humor cannot explain all humor. Gerbils' Incompleteness Theorem.
- bazoom42 2y agoNow explain why some jokes following this formula are hilarious but most are painfully unfunny. This would seem to be the hard part. > I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95. Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.
- forgotacc240419 2y agoWindows 95's start menu was drastically faster than Windows 10's with its default settings. Things like that mean the joke just results in thoughts like "By what metric?" and "Was Windows 95 ever considered famously slow?" Or is the point that the reference doesn't need to be accurate but just has to catch a general vibe of "old = slow"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Retr0id 2y agoI think it's at least three things: 1. win95 has waning cultural relevance, and nobody has any fresh memories of dealing with its slowness 2. most of us have seen "windows bad" jokes a million times over by now - it's stale 3. "run" is a pretty weak/generic connection. Edit: 4 - "I'm bad at running" has a sort of boomer-humor vibe to it, it's less relatable to an audience that's generally in-shape.
- latexr 2y agoExcept that every single joke in that table is awful and that deconstruction on why the joke is bad doesn’t generically apply to all of them.
- Retr0id 2y agoThe column heading just says "mix ideas", I don't think they're supposed to be taken as finished, stand-alone jokes. I think some of them have potential if framed correctly or rephrased a bit (foraging for wild cake, in particular). Take the not entirely dissimilar Windows Vista joke from the IT Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfnjBHtjHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IfnjBHtjHc It's not especially funny if taken in isolation, but in the context of the scene and the show as a whole, I thought it was hilarious, at the time.
- seanhunter 2y agoThe theory presented in this article was articulated in Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation", where he goes on to speculate that all creativity works in this way. It's well worth a read.
- itronitron 2y agoI like the theory that jokes are funny to the extent they enable a discovery of 'shared knowledge' between the teller and audience. I'll provide a light bulb joke as an example... Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's not funny.
- gosub100 2y agoShared beliefs, when they start complaining about things the audience relates to. Or completely obvious things we haven't noticed. A really funny monologue I saw once was a European comedian remarking how many different meanings can be carried by the word 'ass' and how often they are contradictory. Very clever observation.
- nvader 2y agoFor the curious, I suspect this was Ismo. I love his with on pointing out the incongruities in surface level features of English. https://youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU https://youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
- wrp 2y agoCompletely serious, I think Calvin & Hobbes had the best concise explanation. (https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/calvin_absurdity.jpg https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)
- Hoasi 2y agoGreat explanation, indeed, and a gem of a comic.
- qwery 2y agoI'm not sure if I'm missing something (perhaps the joke, as it were) but the Calvin & Hobbes strip seems to be entirely about having a sense of humour, rather than a theory of comedy.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoIt's an interesting thought and a question "why did sense of humor develop through evolution?". I don't think this comic applies to the author's post though. Which is more about how to produce comedy, and seemingly quite one dimensionally? Also I don't think the comics final answer is satisfactory, because you could definitely respond to absurdity, by calling out why something is absurd, you don't have to laugh at it. So why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?
- HPsquared 2y agoComedy is tickling the "false alarm" part of the brain. Laughter is a signal to the group that it's not actually a tiger and we can all relax again.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoOne joke category is something like "getting away with it". A comedian can say anything, and if it's funny they can get away with it. A ton of modern comedians fail at this, but instead of grinding harder to find the funny angles and adapt to the new meta they act like losers and start to blame the audience. 100% skill issue. I've noticed there's some people who just say mean things while trying to be funny, but I haven't cracked the details on what makes these jokes land or flop.
- d--b 2y agoAs seen in Colbert's new cookbook: Does this taste funny?
- namaria 2y agoSaying all you can do is search (brute force) means admitting that we have no theory.
- jelder 2y agoComedy is branch misprediction.
- akoboldfrying 2y agoI think theories of humour have to explain why some jokes/stories are less funny the second time you hear them, while others remain funny forever. Does the "violation" go away after you hear the joke and your brain adapts? That seems plausible to me, but if so, why doesn't that always happen? There's a Seinfeld episode where George gets fired -- and then decides to go back to work anyway, believing that he's teaching them a lesson. I've seen it many times, so I know exactly what's coming, but my brain still can't seem to prepare itself for the deep, character-consistent idiocy of it. I will never not laugh while watching this. The question is: Why?
- Miraltar 2y agoImo these one liners are only fun when they're actually not one liners, meaning when the context is part of the setup.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoYeah, to me, comedy is only actually funny if it's based on something that plausibly happened to the person in real life and it's an interesting, original or clever take on this situation. Not bruteforcing plays on words unless they also come up organically or tie absolutely well to the plausible real life situation. But then it's more like a cherry on top rather than the main funny part. I think a good comedy should also be able to work through multiple languages. It shouldn't be dependent on having those specific words in that specific language.
- OisinMoran 2y ago“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” The equating of jokes and comedy here is an affront for anyone who has explored different avenues of comedy in any way. The analysis is fine and even interesting for (as others have pointed out) one specific type of joke but just flippantly calling that all of comedy is very jarring as it is obviously wrong. I just completed a clown workshop this weekend where I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo, my improvised musical team has gotten laughs and applause from our piano man simply starting to play music and from us rhyming two words, I've seen TJ & Dave erupt a room from being as realistic and truthful as possible in their improv, one of my Edinburgh Fringe highlights was a performer crashing a live podcast recording multiple times and falling over, spilling many pints in the process. That is all just to say that comedy is much more than just jokes, and especially much more than jokes that fit this theory. To be clear though, I am not against attempting such formalisms and theories (I have many myself and do think this kind of thinking is great for generating ideas), I've just yet to see a good comprehensive one.
- clucas 2y agoYes, the article mistakes punchlines for comedy. Watch some of Norm MacDonald's stuff on Conan (troubled moth, Jacques de Gatineaux, drunk dart thrower, Andy the Swedish-German)... sure, the punchlines fit the model in the article, but the real humor comes from his delivery and the weird worlds he creates leading up to the punchlines.
- tetris11 2y agoSame with Phil Hartman and Matt Berry, they can make the most boring lines instantly funny through sheer power of charisma and vocal inflections.
- bena 2y agoWith all of these, there's an element of absurdity. It's not about the world Norm is creating, it's the fact that the words aren't the joke, the joke is on you. The joke is that it's a long, boring story to set up a shitty punchline. You wait, and wait, and wait for the catharsis, but it never comes from the joke itself, it comes only a beat or two after when you realize what just happened. Matt Berry gets mileage out of responding to everything with a sort of bombastic over-seriousness. He is a character that does nothing small. Observational comedy is the pointing out of absurdity in everyday life.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- konschubert 2y agoMy personal theory is that a joke has to be always both surpising, yet fitting. The pattern presented in the article fits that requirement. Maybe it is even equivalent. But that’s just a necessary condition for a good joke, not a sufficient one.
- binary132 2y agoArt isn’t search, nor is it an algorithm to be optimized. Unfortunately, the modern human experience is so utterly commoditized that the incentive to cram everything possible into an algorithmic, quantitative box is enormous and almost overpowering or seemingly inevitable. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to this particular instance, but I do think that in general we need to be willing to resist this cultural phenomenon and put some things behind a line that we’re willing to defend.
- ithkuil 2y agoI understand where you're coming from but unfortunately there is a vector that represents exactly that feeling of yours and it can be found via search
- assanineass 2y agoAgreed
- patcon 2y agoRelated: Information is surprise https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise > If your string of symbols constitutes a passage of English text, then you could just count the number of words it contains. But this is silly: it would give the sentence "The Sun will rise tomorrow" the same information value as he sentence "The world will end tomorrow" when the second is clearly much more significant than the first. Whether or not we find a message informative depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us. > [Claude] Shannon stayed clear of the slippery concept of meaning, declaring it "irrelevant to the engineering problem", but he did take on board the idea that information is related to what's new: it's related to surprise. Thought of in emotional terms surprise is hard to measure, but you can get to grips with it by imagining yourself watching words come out of a ticker tape, like they used to have in news agencies. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion".
- ccppurcell 2y agoSome jokes only require a punchline, since the audience shares common knowledge or assumptions e.g.: It's not funny and the frog dies.
- smokedetector1 2y agoIt's really annoying and deadening, not to mention foolish, when people try to reduce every activity of the soul to a mechanical, comprehensible process.
- tester457 2y agoIf the activities of the soul are so beyond mortal comprehension, then the futile attempt at understanding them should widen the soul in appreciation of the infinite depth of human creativity. Failure at comprehension does not deaden, any more than only seeing a minute fraction of the cosmos deadens the soul. All that remains beyond our understanding should inspire awe.
- smokedetector1 2y agoIts not that the soul is completely beyond mortal comprehension - art, philosophy, etc do a good job of exploring it. But this (philosophically) materialist way of viewing the world, where everything is caused by evolution and so everything is mechanical to the point where you can almost feed it to a computer -- that doesnt inspire awe to me at all. That makes me feel that my actual existence is being denied, because I'm "really just" this simple process. It's blatantly false but for some reason as tech people we like to put ourselves into a box rather than admit some things are beyond mechanical formalization.
- gota 2y agoIf you want to vindicate your distaste, check out the "Joke Examples" section of the argument: > And here are a few jokes that were created using this method: (...) > "I'm awful at jogging, I'm running slower than windows 95" (...) > "You're such a great guy! - I'm not a great guy. Abraham Lincoln was a great guy. I'm a barely adequate guy." (...) These are two out of 6 examples there - all are extremely plain and boring, except maybe for the last (which is just barely funny).
- smokedetector1 2y agoI like how they highlighted a commonality between two disparate things. When I recognized the pattern, my neurons lit up, eliciting a pleasurable response.
- amelius 2y agoBe careful what you search for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qklvh5Cp_Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qklvh5Cp_Bs
- taeric 2y agoI've come to think of most everything as a search. It works far better as a metaphor than makes sense. Learning, Optimization, Modeling, etc. For many, it is clearly a multivariable search. ML, as an easy example, is both searching for a good model and searching for the optimal parameters to it.
- andychert 2y ago[dead]
- visarga 2y agoI have a theory that everything is search. Protein folding? Search for minimal energy. DNA evolution - search for ecological niche fit. Cognition? attention is search, memory is search, imagination is also search, problem solving - of course is search. Scientific progress? It is (re)search. Optimizing an AI model? Search for optimal parameters to fit the data. Reinforcement learning? Search for optimal behavior to maximize rewards. Even speaking is search - we output words in sequence, searching the next word like LLMs. Now I can add comedy to the list. <rant>Search is a nice concept, it defines everything clearly - search space, goal space, action space. Compare it with fuzzy concepts like understanding, intelligence and consciousness. We can never define them, precisely because they gloss over their input-output domains and try to present a distributed process as centralized in the brain. Search has a bunch of properties - it is compositional, hierarchical, recurrent (iterative in time) and recursive. This pattern holds across many fields, I think it is based on the fundamental properties of space-time which are also compositional, hierarchical and recurrent (object state at time t+1 depends on its state at time t) Search can be personal, inter-personal, physical or information based. It can explain away much of the mystery of the three fuzzy concepts I mentioned. I describe cognition as two search loops - search externally by applying known behavior to collect experience, and search internally to compress experience and update behavior.</>
- CooCooCaCha 2y agoLately I’ve come to think of science as a large-scale search algorithm so I think there’s truth to what you’re saying and it’s interesting to think about.
- nxobject 2y agoI think another way to put that really good idea is simply to say that humans are innately wired to explore and discover!
- duderific 2y agoNot surprising I guess, since our survival literally depended on that capability for tens of thousands of years (and still does, to a lesser extent)
- codeflo 2y agoI'd like a theory to explain why a certain class of jokes makes me feel physical pain, when others find them hilarious. This example from the article, > Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives. firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.
- xattt 2y agoIt’s a learned behaviour. Outside of North American culture, I don’t think there are “groaner” jokes.
- jameshart 2y agoI think it comes down to delivery. This premise in this format sets up a groan reaction. But essentially the same elements used by a good standup, telling a story, saying something like “so I was playing super Mario with my cat, and of course he is wiping the floor with me, because… you know… nine lives” could get a solid laugh. Or a far side like cartoon of a cat playing a video game with a dog, and the dog looking upset while the cat looks smug… The elements of a joke are there, but you still have to construct it into a delivery vehicle that lands it.
- cyco130 2y agoThere is some connection between music and comedy (or at least joke punchlines, like many, I'm not convinced this theory explains how all comedy works): Musical structure almost always relies on establishing a pattern (repetition) and breaking it (contrast).
- clueless 2y agocomedy is simply an inevitable surprise!
- stevage 2y agoThis analysis is pretty good, and I liked the presentation style. He lets himself down by saying "all comedy" when he doesn't need to. He's analysing a specific type of joke structure, and that's fine. He doesn't need to overreach like this.
- camillomiller 2y agoThis feels like a manual for a completely humorless person to trying and understand why people laugh. I appreciate the effort, but it's quite naive, and honestly most of the example jokes are just bad puns.
- tug2024 2y agoDon’t forget about The Greeno Test (1978)! ::= Analogies Anagrams Transformations
- antiquark 2y agoThank God for the hatchery.
- JoblessWonder 2y agoFreud has a book on jokes called "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" which I thought was pretty interesting (although I mostly read the first section which analyzed the technique of the joke and the tendencies of the joke.)
- soniman 2y agoIf you are going to make a video about how comedy works you have to begin it with a joke and then use your theory to explain that joke. I don't want to hear your theory unless you give me something to think about first.
- blueyes 2y agoSteve Allen's "How to be funny" presents a compelling model of humor as a deliberate misinterpretation of the setup, which is delivered in the punchline. So you have initial context, pivot, and misinterpretation. The most powerful versions of that reveal universal, strong and suppressed emotions as well as our basic human fallibility. Urinal cakes?! I'll never fall for that one again...
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- bostik 2y agoComedy is a complex, living, writhing thing. With rules. This article feels like the author has taken the concept of one-liner (arguably the densest form of standup comedy) and extended that to be comedy at large. I feel like you could take the Comedian's Comedian podcast episode with Gary Delaney, and get a much more effective lesson with the same content. Disclosure: I've done standup. It is frightening. It's also a lot of fun.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoSee Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud for a similar analysis with far more depth.
- buescher 2y agoAh, yes, a step-by-step method for creating comedy from a site called rpgadventures - complete with templates, diagrams, and tables - what's funnier than that?
- itsjustmath 2y agoOnce of my favorite visual breakdowns of comedy structure is the interactive site The Pudding did for an Ali Wong standup show a couple years back: https://pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/ https://pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/
- _sys49152 2y agocomedy is search = you need to always be 'turned on' and working with details.
- joelignaatius 2y agoI don't get it.