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Comedy Theory (2022)

by harryf on 9/27/24, 12:35 PM with 175 comments

• by OisinMoran on 10/1/24, 12:18 PM

  “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  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.

• by visarga on 10/1/24, 2:14 PM

  I have a theory that everything is search. Protein folding? Search for minimal energy. DNA evolution - search for ecological niche fit. Cognition? attention is search, memory is search, imagination is also search, problem solving - of course is search. Scientific progress? It is (re)search. Optimizing an AI model? Search for optimal parameters to fit the data. Reinforcement learning? Search for optimal behavior to maximize rewards. Even speaking is search - we output words in sequence, searching the next word like LLMs. Now I can add comedy to the list.

  <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.</>

• by everdrive on 10/1/24, 10:26 AM

  I've yet to see a theory of comedy which actually addresses that there are multiple kinds of comedy:

  - 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.

• by wrp on 10/1/24, 11:26 AM

  Completely serious, I think Calvin & Hobbes had the best concise explanation.

  (https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)

• by ixxie on 10/1/24, 9:48 AM

  Almost reinvented the Benign Violation Theory: https://humorresearchlab.com/benign-violation-theory/

• by akoboldfrying on 10/1/24, 12:11 PM

  I think theories of humour have to explain why some jokes/stories are less funny the second time you hear them, while others remain funny forever. Does the "violation" go away after you hear the joke and your brain adapts? That seems plausible to me, but if so, why doesn't that always happen?

  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?

• by klar120 on 10/1/24, 10:21 AM

  This is exclusively the most primitive joke category base on double meanings. The jokes listed are boring and maybe suited for fillers in a standup routine.

  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.

• by harryf on 9/27/24, 12:35 PM

  Ran into this today. From doing comedy for about 7 years now, this basically correct. Although most comedians approach joke writing organically rather than with this approach

• by itronitron on 10/1/24, 11:20 AM

  I like the theory that jokes are funny to the extent they enable a discovery of 'shared knowledge' between the teller and audience.

  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.

• by seanhunter on 10/1/24, 11:17 AM

  The theory presented in this article was articulated in Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation", where he goes on to speculate that all creativity works in this way. It's well worth a read.

• by smokedetector1 on 10/1/24, 1:31 PM

  It's really annoying and deadening, not to mention foolish, when people try to reduce every activity of the soul to a mechanical, comprehensible process.

• by iimaginary on 10/1/24, 10:20 AM

  A man swears he discovered the secret formula to satire. Turns out, it’s just one cup of irony and a lack of self-awareness, baked at 350 for 20 minutes.

• by patcon on 10/1/24, 12:46 PM

  Related: Information is surprise https://plus.maths.org/content/information-surprise

  > 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".

• by TheAceOfHearts on 10/1/24, 12:00 PM

  One joke category is something like "getting away with it". A comedian can say anything, and if it's funny they can get away with it. A ton of modern comedians fail at this, but instead of grinding harder to find the funny angles and adapt to the new meta they act like losers and start to blame the audience. 100% skill issue.

  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.

• by bostik on 10/1/24, 5:03 PM

  Comedy is a complex, living, writhing thing. With rules.

  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.

• by taeric on 10/1/24, 2:01 PM

  I've come to think of most everything as a search. It works far better as a metaphor than makes sense. Learning, Optimization, Modeling, etc. For many, it is clearly a multivariable search. ML, as an easy example, is both searching for a good model and searching for the optimal parameters to it.

• by codeflo on 10/1/24, 2:21 PM

  I'd like a theory to explain why a certain class of jokes makes me feel physical pain, when others find them hilarious. This example from the article,

  > Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives.

  firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.

• by HPsquared on 10/1/24, 11:55 AM

  Comedy is tickling the "false alarm" part of the brain.

  Laughter is a signal to the group that it's not actually a tiger and we can all relax again.

• by blueyes on 10/1/24, 4:41 PM

  Steve Allen's "How to be funny" presents a compelling model of humor as a deliberate misinterpretation of the setup, which is delivered in the punchline. So you have initial context, pivot, and misinterpretation.

  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...

• by itsjustmath on 10/2/24, 12:03 AM

  Once of my favorite visual breakdowns of comedy structure is the interactive site The Pudding did for an Ali Wong standup show a couple years back: https://pudding.cool/2018/02/stand-up/

• by lupusreal on 10/1/24, 10:31 AM

  Is there a theory of humor which explains why theories of humor are invariably hilariously inadaquate?

• by cyco130 on 10/1/24, 2:26 PM

  There is some connection between music and comedy (or at least joke punchlines, like many, I'm not convinced this theory explains how all comedy works): Musical structure almost always relies on establishing a pattern (repetition) and breaking it (contrast).

• by stevage on 10/1/24, 2:36 PM

  This analysis is pretty good, and I liked the presentation style.

  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.

• by JoblessWonder on 10/1/24, 3:44 PM

  Freud has a book on jokes called "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" which I thought was pretty interesting (although I mostly read the first section which analyzed the technique of the joke and the tendencies of the joke.)

• by soniman on 10/1/24, 3:59 PM

  If you are going to make a video about how comedy works you have to begin it with a joke and then use your theory to explain that joke. I don't want to hear your theory unless you give me something to think about first.

• by jelder on 10/1/24, 12:08 PM

  Comedy is branch misprediction.

• by konschubert on 10/1/24, 12:27 PM

  My personal theory is that a joke has to be always both surpising, yet fitting.

  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.

• by camillomiller on 10/1/24, 2:43 PM

  This feels like a manual for a completely humorless person to trying and understand why people laugh. I appreciate the effort, but it's quite naive, and honestly most of the example jokes are just bad puns.

• by buescher on 10/1/24, 10:49 PM

  Ah, yes, a step-by-step method for creating comedy from a site called rpgadventures - complete with templates, diagrams, and tables - what's funnier than that?

• by amelius on 10/1/24, 1:41 PM

  Be careful what you search for:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qklvh5Cp_Bs

• by binary132 on 10/1/24, 12:33 PM

  Art isn’t search, nor is it an algorithm to be optimized. Unfortunately, the modern human experience is so utterly commoditized that the incentive to cram everything possible into an algorithmic, quantitative box is enormous and almost overpowering or seemingly inevitable. Maybe I’m overreacting a little to this particular instance, but I do think that in general we need to be willing to resist this cultural phenomenon and put some things behind a line that we’re willing to defend.

• by Miraltar on 10/1/24, 12:15 PM

  Imo these one liners are only fun when they're actually not one liners, meaning when the context is part of the setup.

• by ccppurcell on 10/1/24, 1:00 PM

  Some jokes only require a punchline, since the audience shares common knowledge or assumptions e.g.:

  It's not funny and the frog dies.

• by DiscourseFan on 10/1/24, 9:48 PM

  See Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud for a similar analysis with far more depth.

• by fire_lake on 10/1/24, 9:55 AM

  Writing jokes was once considered an “AGI level” task - but after reading this I’m not so sure!

• by d--b on 10/1/24, 12:05 PM

  As seen in Colbert's new cookbook: Does this taste funny?

• by tug2024 on 10/1/24, 2:46 PM

  Don’t forget about The Greeno Test (1978)!

  ::=

  Analogies Anagrams Transformations

• by _sys49152 on 10/2/24, 2:01 AM

  comedy is search = you need to always be 'turned on' and working with details.

• by bazoom42 on 10/1/24, 10:43 AM

  Now explain why some jokes following this formula are hilarious but most are painfully unfunny. This would seem to be the hard part.

  > I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95.

  Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.

• by antiquark on 10/1/24, 2:52 PM

  Thank God for the hatchery.

• by namaria on 10/1/24, 12:10 PM

  Saying all you can do is search (brute force) means admitting that we have no theory.

• by joelignaatius on 10/2/24, 2:49 AM

  I don't get it.

• by clueless on 10/1/24, 2:34 PM

  comedy is simply an inevitable surprise!