"Comedy is search" – theory on how jokes work
The article explores comedy theory, detailing joke structure with setups and punchlines, emphasizing absurd associations, contrast, and various formats for humor, encouraging creativity in comedy writing.
Read original articleThe article discusses a theory of comedy, focusing on the structure and creation of jokes. It explains that jokes consist of a setup and a punchline, where the setup establishes a pattern that the audience recognizes, and the punchline disrupts that pattern, leading to a humorous twist. The key to effective jokes lies in finding a "Common Aspect," which connects two unrelated patterns through a shared element that can be interpreted in different ways. The article emphasizes the importance of "absurd associations," where unexpected connections between ideas create humor. Techniques for generating jokes include breaking down patterns into aspects, mixing patterns, and using absurdity to enhance the humor. The author also highlights the significance of contrast and connection in joke construction, suggesting that the more disparate the patterns, the funnier the joke can be. Additionally, the article touches on various formats for expressing comedic ideas, such as one-liners, dialogues, and sketches. It encourages readers to explore their creativity in comedy writing and offers resources for further learning and community engagement.
- Jokes consist of a setup that establishes a pattern and a punchline that disrupts it.
- The "Common Aspect" connects unrelated patterns, leading to humor.
- Absurd associations and unexpected connections are central to joke creation.
- Contrast between patterns enhances the funniness of a joke.
- Various formats exist for expressing comedic ideas, including sketches and one-liners.
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- Many commenters argue that the article oversimplifies comedy by focusing primarily on one-liner jokes, neglecting the diversity of comedic styles and formats.
- Several users emphasize the importance of context and shared knowledge in humor, suggesting that not all jokes fit neatly into the proposed structure.
- There is a recurring theme of skepticism towards reducing comedy to a mechanical or algorithmic process, with some expressing concern about the commodification of art.
- Commenters highlight the subjective nature of humor, noting that what is funny to one person may not be to another, and questioning the effectiveness of the theories presented.
- Some users reference existing theories and works on humor, suggesting that the article's approach lacks depth and fails to address the nuances of comedic expression.
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.
<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.</>
- 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 -- 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
- Social awkwardness humor / Dramatic irony. See all / most of Arrested Development.
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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?
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
> Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives.
firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.
Laughter is a signal to the group that it's not actually a tiger and we can all relax again.
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...
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.
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.
It's not funny and the frog dies.
::=
Analogies Anagrams Transformations
> I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95.
Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.
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