As someone who wrote a humor book and am currently working on another, this topic fascinates me. For the last month, I've been analyzing jokes from different comedians, looking for the root of why they're funny.
As I see it, humor is something that ventures outside of our own "world," yet relates to it. Someone else's inside joke isn't funny to you because it doesn't relate to the "world" you live in. This is also true of referential humor like Family Guy. If you don't know the reference, it's generally not funny.
From analyzing about 30 jokes, these are some of the repeating themes I've come across:
- Change the context of something (by far the most common)
- Taking a phrase literally
- Explain something that doesn't need to be explained.
- Under exaggerate.
- Over exaggerate.
- Connect two unrelated things.
- Say something predictable and then take what would have been the cliched ending to an extreme.
The core of these elements and many others is that you're taking a shared view of something and manipulating it, whether through changing the context, taking an element to an extreme, or one of the other numerous ways.
Everyone knows if something is funny on a subconscious level, but few can explain why they laughed at something. Much like how most people know if they like a movie or not, but can't articulate the exact elements that caused them to enjoy the story (unless they've read several books on screenwriting/story telling). I'd be very interested in seeing the results from this study.
"For the last month, I've been analyzing jokes from different comedians, looking for the root of why they're funny."
Don't forget to take into account the skill, voice, tone, cadence and delivery of the joke.
The same exact words said by different people different ways can be funny or not.
As an example using Mac Speech you can sometimes make even ordinary sentences funny because combining those ordinary words with a rote computer voice can be very funny.
I don't have a particular example handy but some of those http://www.xtranormal.com/ videos that I've seen are good at that.
As I see it, humor is something that ventures outside of our own "world," yet relates to it. Someone else's inside joke isn't funny to you because it doesn't relate to the "world" you live in. This is also true of referential humor like Family Guy. If you don't know the reference, it's generally not funny.
From analyzing about 30 jokes, these are some of the repeating themes I've come across: - Change the context of something (by far the most common) - Taking a phrase literally - Explain something that doesn't need to be explained. - Under exaggerate. - Over exaggerate. - Connect two unrelated things. - Say something predictable and then take what would have been the cliched ending to an extreme.
The core of these elements and many others is that you're taking a shared view of something and manipulating it, whether through changing the context, taking an element to an extreme, or one of the other numerous ways.
Everyone knows if something is funny on a subconscious level, but few can explain why they laughed at something. Much like how most people know if they like a movie or not, but can't articulate the exact elements that caused them to enjoy the story (unless they've read several books on screenwriting/story telling). I'd be very interested in seeing the results from this study.