I’ve heard some say there is a “science” to making jokes and comedy. Is that true?
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Yes. It’s called Humor Research or Humor Studies and focuses largely on the psychological and physiological effects.
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There’s a structure to jokes that starts w a narrative and ends with a punchline. The punchline is usually surprising/unexpected, and that’s what makes most jokes funny. Anti jokes are purposefully not funny, which makes them funny because you were expecting g something funny but got a dud…which is unexpected and therefore often funny.
Example that comes to mind
Sarah Silverman talked about getting feedback from Jerry Seinfeld, and how he told her was that she was hitting a good “laughs per minute”.
She didn’t even know that was a thing, but she said it made a ton of sense once she heard it.
What he was talking about was *pacing*. Its not enough to say some funny things and make people laugh. It was about pacing the delivery of the funny bits to evoke the laugh response from the crowd at a rate that is frequent enough to keep the audience engaged, but spaced out enough to be sustainable and make each funny thing stick on its own.
Think of it the same way a *good* music DJ knows how to pace the crowd. You wouldn’t want to just pound the crowd with the beat all night. They’d get burned out right? A good DJ knows how to build the feeling up… the hit them with some real hype, then bring them back down, then pump them back up again.
So, that’s not ALL of the “science” but as one example of an scientific aspect, pace and timing vs human attention span absolutely makes sense.
Many comedians swear there are only five jokes (or at least five primary joke structures), and the only thing that changes is the content or subject but any joke can be neatly categorised into one of these five. You also have a lot of established mechanisms in comedy, like for example callbacks (referencing something that was said earlier) or left turns (saying something unexpected), etc.
So yes, there is a “science” but there are also lots of room for creativity and having your own voice.
A good analogy is music: there are only 12 notes on a piano, but you can write an infinite number of songs using those 12 notes because music is also about textures, melody, tempo, etc.
If there weren’t, humor wouldn’t be reproduceable so comedians wouldn’t exist – no one would be able to be funnier than anyone else.
There’s a VSauce video that suggests humor “tests unspoken common knowledge between the teller and the audience” which separates social ingroups and outgroups, and I find this is the most consistent common thread among virtually all humor. Bad humor does this in really unsubtle ways (worst case scenario being blackface,) good humor does it in novel ways and often frames old information in a new context.
Currently the funniest thing I’ve ever seen is this satirical infographic about Hitler ([https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/zsi6sw/hitlerule/](https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/zsi6sw/hitlerule/)) I highly suggest reading it before finishing this comment as I’m about to spoil the joke.
So ultimately this meme follows the same formula I described. There are several instances of unspoken (well, sometimes spoken) common knowledge here.
Overuse of modern buzzwords and lexicon (toxic, cishet, boundaries) and the juxtaposition between the cute infographics and simple language versus the seriousness and complexity of the subject matter – this is ultimately a commentary on how information is diluted, oversimplified, and made more politically correct and advertiser friendly (especially in the way that it makes gross understatements about the severity of the historical events it describes,) even at the cost of being disingenuous.
Last, the transition into a Casper mattress ad cranks up the commentary about being advertiser friendly and disingenuous. It takes the fallacy of Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad (specifically how it attempted to commercialize social change) and uses it as a punchline to deliver things that are hinted at with more subtlety throughout the beginning of the infographic.
There’s a huge social commentary here, but what I really like about it is that it starts subtle enough that it’s not immediately clear that it’s satire before ultimately satirizing what it’s making fun of by becoming a caricature.
Of course, there are plenty of other things to humor, such as comedic timing and utilizing shock (shock humor on its own is lazy, but shock remains an important ingredient in a well-rounded joke.)
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