What Makes Comedy Funny?

A woman's child dies. Tragic? Almost definitely.

A guy slips and falls down. Funny?

That depends on your entire life history.

Comedy Is Context

Drama tends to appeal to the human audience's broader sense of justice, of right and wrong, of tragedy vs. exultation. Deep down, we can say with certainty whether something is a positive or negative event. And, by and large, the bulk of humanity agrees with the typical evaluations: war, sickness and death are (usually) bad, and love, marriage and success are (usually) good.

Meanwhile, comedy appeals to a different part of the human condition: the intellect. In comedy, we don't require an emotional response for the laughs to be effective. Instead, we need a disconnect between the expected action and the actual action. That's the rift that causes surprise, which leads to amusement / hilarity.

But that rift is dependent upon what YOU expected to happen, and what YOU expected might not be what I expected to happen. That's because we all approach new information from different previous experiences, which determine whether something is confusing, surprising or offensive -- to US.

It also explains why one person might find the Three Stooges hilarious and someone else might find them unbearably idiotic.

What You Ate for Breakfast Determines Your Sense of Humor

Everything you've ever done, seen, heard or experienced influences your worldview today. The less you've done, the more easily you're surprised, and therefore the more likely you are to find something funny: your frame of reference is small enough that EVERYTHING is new / strange / different.

Thus, even if you don't laugh WITH someone, you're well-prepared to laugh AT someone (because they're different, and laughter is a safe form of self-defense.)

Meanwhile, if your life is more cosmopolitan -- if you have a wider basis of experience to draw from -- then you're less likely to be surprised by simple humor. You see the jokes coming. What 90% of the public finds surprising is second nature to you.

Congratulations: you're the kind of audience Hollywood hates.

YOU appreciate jokes that require lengthy set-ups and payoffs.

YOU enjoy witty turns of phrase and intellectual acrobatics.

YOU understand conflicts across multiple layers of characterization.

In short, you're an audience that requires more work from a storyteller in order to be surprised. This means you're in a rarefied niche. And you're incredibly hard to reach, because there are fewer artists with the tools necessary to surprise you.

This is why black comedies, satires and dialogue-driven comedies are in such short supply: their audiences are, by nature, much smaller. This means they're more work to make AND they're less-profitable.

And, meanwhile, the Scary Movie franchise keeps on chugging...

The Lost Art of Learning

I was reading in Business 2.0 about Jeff Hawkins, the gent who created the Palm Pilot and the Treo. His driving passion is apparently neuroscience, and his team is currently at work on an application called Numenta, which is basically a computer that's programmed to learn like a human.

Then, somewhere down the article, the author mentions that humans don't yet know exactly how the brain works, but if they did...

And then I realized: when did we, as a society, become so quick to proclaim that we DO know everything?

I think back to my gradeschool and high school textbooks, especially in science and social studies, which I now realize, only a decade or two later, were mostly hogwash or propaganda. Not only is the Civil War (and every other aspect of history) much more complex than most schools ever let on, but now we know basic fundamentals of science -- like Pluto being a planet -- are wrong.

And yet, to watch most TV commercials, read most books, see most films, you'd think we were living in the age of complete knowledge. I'm sure this has always been the case for humanity -- to act as though it knows absolutely everything about its world -- which explains the initial treatment of "heretics" like Galileo and the idealogical wars between Socrates and the sophists.

But to admit that we don't know how something works -- that's kind of a sobering statement, in the midst of all this knowledge, no?

It got me thinking... what else do we not know? And why not?

Somewhere along the way, the art of learning became passe and was replaced by the artlessness of knowing. Knowledge is useless in a vacuum, which means we, as a society, should be forever pushing forward to better understand ourselves and our surroundings, so that we may always be improving as both individuals AND a society. And yet, how many people are scorned or ridiculed for attempting to learn more about that which we, as a society, admit we know very little?

It's almost like a generalized conservative mentality, which mandates that we NOT ask questions or seek to know things beyond our immediate reach, has pervaded the status quo and caused us to see curiosity or individuality as a weakness and an idiosyncracy to be expunged, rather than a possible avenue to enlightenment which should be supported and celebrated.

Heady thoughts, I know, and not at all what you or I might expect to consider when reading a copy of Business 2.0... And it has nothing specifically to do with our web series... I'm just wondering...