Humor

Everyone has a sense of humor. It’s a deep, subconscious feeling that resonates through many symbolic associations to create a unique form of amusement.

At its core, humor is an out-of-place connection. It can come from various places:

• Exaggeration and blowing things way out of proportion
• A play on words (i.e., puns)
• Broken logic where “fixing” the logic is literally impossible
• Connecting unrelated things by a purely coincidental or incidental association

Humor is highly contextual for the simple reason that it requires an emotional connection to something familiar.

Humor is similar to horror in that it defies reality. However, while horror directs us further into the unknown or toward severe hardship, humor simply defies our expectations in every conceivable direction, including our expectations of the unknown or severe hardship!

The mechanism to create humor requires a very specific skill of performing several tasks in sequence:

1. Mentally assemble an imaginary model of the experience.
2. Detect any discrepancies in all the possible interpretations of the experience. This particular step requires severe awareness that only comes through pushing past any trauma or fear.
3. Remove any uninteresting perspectives from that set of experiences to only leave the discrepancies and their relationships.
4. Add artistic flair to those discrepancies to distort those relationships even further.

Imitation constitutes a significant portion of humor. Exaggeration creates “parody”, and imitating power is “satire”. Since all power has its season, all satirical humor will become dated within a decade or two. However, satire strips away power because it reminds people of the finite humanity of the people wielding that power.

There are a few ways to stretch reality to make humor:

• Farce makes improbable things probable by delivering the concept through a distorted form of logic. Adults behaving precisely like children, for example, is a profound source of humor.
• Hyperbole exaggerates truth to the point of emotional extremes, which includes body language (“pantomime”).
• Metaphor and puns create symbolic connections that create extra meanings.
• Like with magicians, re-framing and timing can exploit expectations to fool the audience into believing an implication.

Often, when a trope is used frequently enough, people become savvy enough to predict it. At that point, a humorist must invert the trope and do something else unexpected. Naturally, as understanding scales, most funny things become less funny.

Humor always has the same components that form into a story:

1. A setup that builds up expectations, usually by imitating reality somehow. It can be as simple as saying “a lawyer” or “a man walks into a bar”. Typically, it’s when a comedian walks on stage or when someone crouches a little in an “I’m going to hunt” pose.
2. A drawn-out delivery. The more drawn-out, the more people are setting expectations, at least until they get bored.
3. A concluding punchline that violates the audience’s expectations. It might be something spoken, a visual gag, or (in the case of an inversion) the absence of something expected.

Every funny idea has at least two of six dimensions:

1. Familiar – something someone has previously experienced
   • This varies wildly across people.
   • The more familiar, the less you need other dimensions.
2. Cute – someone weak and lovable
   • e.g., puppies, children, kittens, adorable animations
   • They can be visual or simply have a lovable personality.
3. Cruel – something mean or unfair
   1. While it must hurt, it must also be unfair pain.
   2. At its most extreme, cruel humor is called “dark humor”.
4. Bizarre – breaking from reality
   • It must be surreal, but it can’t be unbelievable because people must keep believing that it could theoretically happen.
   • The simplest version of this is to imagine a world where everything is the same except for one small detail.
5. Naughty – breaking a taboo
   • Naughty things are dirty, unclean, lewd, or inappropriate, and often sexual.
   • The funnier the joke, the more you can get away with.
   • Handle this dimension carefully in polite company.
6. Intuitive – creative application of an idea
   • There are many ways to creatively build humor outside what people expect.
   • All you have to do is surprise people with your connection.

The punchline is often either far more elaborate than the rest of the story or far simpler. Since it’s the climax of the story, it’s the most important part of any good humor.

No matter what, the punchline needs both pain and surprise. Someone has to suffer a pratfall, public shame, embarrassment, or future pain (such as from a mess). In the case of a practical joke or bad pun with a long delivery, the audience is the one in pain.

A punchline can sometimes extend beyond the joke:

• A “brick joke” uses the failed punchline of a previous joke as the punchline of a future one. It’s aptly named from a not-funny joke that ends with someone throwing away a brick, then the next joke’s punchline involving someone getting hit with a brick out of nowhere. Brick jokes allow creative comedians to recover from a failed joke.
• A “running joke” uses a successful punchline of a previous joke to recall all the associations of the first joke into another one, often adding extra components to the joke in the process. It repeats itself as a trend, much like musical choruses.

Since humor draws from something familiar, it usually includes truths about reality. The attitude of the comedian must resonate with the audience for them to find something funny:

• Everyone does silly or dumb things, so a dimwitted person is funny.
• Many people have base thoughts (e.g., farts, sex jokes), so they find them funny.
• When someone behaves rudely or harshly to someone else, everyone either identifies with the aggressor or the victim.
• An irreverent comedian is violating social rules that almost everyone, deep down, would love to explore themselves.

Many comedians influence crowds toward their reasoning by softening harsh, painful ideas with humor. The easiest method is to blow reality way out of proportion until it’s surreal, then add silly things to it. Most of the best comedy will mix in other feelings (e.g., sadness, fear) because it will subversively confront aspects of the good life and bad systems while people are laughing.

The simplest expression of humor comes through a formalized public speech called “standup comedy”. It’s comparatively easy to perform, so all other forms of humor trend from standup, with the possible exception of written humor. There are a few broad, non-mutually-exclusive classes of standup comedy:

• A string of relatively unrelated one-line quips, often by talking very fast or speaking offensively (e.g., Rodney Dangerfield).
• Offense humor, often aimed at shocking the audience or directly offending at least some of them (e.g., Sacha Baron Cohen).
• Casual humor, usually relaxed and amicable with a flourish of shock at the end (e.g., Steve Martin).
• Conversational humor, typically involving a long and generally uninteresting story, with a contrasting surprise at the end (e.g., Lucille Ball, most 1950s/1960s humor).
• Observational comedy, which addresses the absurdity of specific mundane things, and frequently safe for families (e.g., Jerry Seinfeld).
• Exaggerating typical nuisances of life, frequently with the manic intensity of a string of stories (e.g., Gabriel Iglesias, Jeff Foxworthy).
• Anger rant, with the punch line directed at the comedian by stating petty observations about tiny, frustrating things mixed with extreme, cold truths that are often political (e.g., George Carlin, Denis Leary).

Humor isn’t merely jokes and comedians. We find humor frequently throughout life in communicating and action, but usually when reflecting on patterns from the past. Writing allows for a slow buildup of various ideas together to form a highly complex funny idea.

Generally, the more painful and unique an experience is, the more humor we’ll draw from it later once we get over the trauma from it. We won’t find humor in the present-tense if we’re afraid of anything.

One aspect hiding behind humor is that it’s a reliable stress relief from the awful things that can happen to us. It’s why successful people tend to also have a sense of humor.

Application

By understanding humor, we can understand the social commentary that hides behind it, which is a key part of gaining wisdom. Taking comedians seriously is living in a profoundly simple and audacious image of reality.

There’s a humorous side to absolutely every situation, even when it takes creativity to find it. However, the seriousness of a culture’s traditions (e.g., religion) is often harshly opposed to levity.

Humor is necessary for the good life because it helps us cope with stress, specifically with surprising and painful things. While serious-minded people may appear to be successful or competent, they are frequently mentally unwell.

One of the easiest ways to influence others is through adding at least a bit of humor to pretty much everything. It’s difficult to hate someone you find funny.

To dismantle a centralized power structure, learn to be funny. Many wars have been fought over, in part, giving people the right to laugh at their leadership.

If death wasn’t a thing, everything about humanity would be absolutely hilarious. This is, in some ways, the basis of religious joyfulness.

Any effort by leadership to impose rules against humor is guaranteed to backfire.