The Nature of Comedy

What is comedy really all about? To answer this we must consider how people define comedy. The following is a blog post by Levi Durham.

Sitcom is short for situational comedy; this means that in order to truly understand sitcoms, we must delve into the nature of comedy. While truly explaining comedy scientifically has not yet been achieved by humans, we have made progress on explaining what we instinctively know about comedy into words.

Surprise is perhaps the most important aspect of comedy. However, finding out you failed on a test that you thought you passed feels unexpected, but not funny. To be humorous, something cannot induce negative emotions, or at least not strong ones. For this reason, certain topics, such as death, work poorly for jokes. The joke may be “funny”, but instead of laughing the audience feels melancholy. However, because comparatively few people joke about these topics, people expect these jokes less. If one can find a way to distance the audience from the more negative emotions enough, the jokes can be extra funny. This leads to the phenomenon of “dark humor,” or “black comedy,”, which involves jokes with morbid topics executed in such a way that avoids strong negative emotions.

The terms “topic” and “execution” were both mentioned in the previous paragraph, but what do they mean? Put simply, the topic is the bare content of the joke, in the same way that a summary is the bare content of a book. Execution is how someone tells a joke, complete with all of the techniques they utilize. Since most people have a natural sense of humor, most teaching on comedy focuses execution. This includes skills such as timing, inflection, and context.

When you explain a joke, you separate execution from topic. Since execution is so important, explaining a joke is less funny than telling it. This is especially true for dark humor. If a joke addresses uncomfortable topics, explaining it makes it sound worse. This can be viewed as either the quality of the joke on its own being biased, as the execution clouds people’s judgement, or that the explanation is biased because it removes execution to make the joke sound worse.

Is that joke really funny? Think about quality, execution, timing, and topic.

This potential is important to the discussion of the offensiveness of sitcoms such as “Friends” and “New Girl.” While they may not be as strong in dark humor as other shows such as “South Park,” any potential sexist and homophobic jokes can be viewed through the lense of explaining dark humor. Both the jokes themselves and the explanations of the jokes must be considered, and only through knowledge of both can one come to an informed decision about either sitcom.