Did a similar 6 week class in standup many many years ago.
Two major things I learned were
a) you have to get the audience hooked in the first 20-30 secs or it gets much harder.
Best example Emo Philips opening with “You know it’s really hard when you have to kill a family member because they are the devil. <Pause for laughter>.
Other that it’s been a great day”. Now that’s a hook :-)
b) the concept of “laughs per minute” - ie there is a certain rate at which the laughs become self sustaining. It’s 3-4 laughs per minute. If you can keep that up for 2 mins the audience is in a state of laughter that keeps getting more and more intense. If you do less than 2 laughs a minute the energy drops between each laugh and you have to work really hard to bring it back to level. Key is to maintain a rate that results in a high ambient level of hilarity bordering with at least a couple of people cackling loudly and losing it.
Nevertheless when you do a successful set you feel like Superman when you walk off the stage.
I remember watching this right after he died, and was blown away by how good he was. Not only does he get laughs right away, they're sustained. I went back and timed it, and his first 2 minutes on stage has 1 minute of audience laughter and applause. He nails all the things you mentioned, and has the whole audience roaring in under 3 minutes.
that was fantastic, but i feel it's cheating a bit when you just make fun of yourself for being fat for 3 straight minutes. If you took away the obesity, i wonder if it'd have been as easy for him to get laughs. The same thing happens when people harp on their ethnic quirks constantly in sets. Take that away and what else do you have?
I've noticed a pattern in comedians who have a funny set but never make it big. They have a shtick that works, lean into it, then end up using it as a crutch.
Then you get creative like Mark Normand (who looks like a garden variety white guy) but draws a lot from his settings and surroundings.
I don't blame people for using their physical idiosyncrasies or ethnicity to get their foot in the door. But you're right in that it only goes so far and you gotta evolve.
This was a great read! I had a planned sabbaticle from work, scheduled to start in April, 2020, and I planned on studying/practicing standup at a local comedy place in Denver. Covid blew a hole in that, obviously, and I've not done it.
This all reminds me of a paper I've read, and think about regularly. The author, or others, might be interested. I've posted notes and a link to the paper here:
The argument is something like "when our expectations are subverted, and new visible order snaps into view, we feel satisfied and interested". Curiosity and expectation seems to play a large role in humor and standup.
Thanks for this article, Michael! I've subscribed via RSS! I am thankful to have found your website.
Was it Rise Comedy? I did the standup 101 class, it was a good time! I had fun with my showcase but definitely decided it wasn't for me. Totally recommend doing it, performing on an open mic for the first time(s) is such a wild experience that you won't get anywhere else :)
hey thanks! Since reading this post, I remembered that hands-down the best talk I ever gave had _quite a lot_ of humor in it, lots of it technical.
I'm quite proud of it, and as I've told other people about it, I specifically mention a "laughs per minute" rate of, for the first few minutes, an impressive rate! (It wasn't just my humor, definitely a group experience) I think it went great, in large part because it was a quite improvisational, reactive experience.
It feels _so_ strange to plug oneself's talk, but here we are:
"Move Slow and Improve Things: Performance Improvement in a Rails App"
To the degree that it was successful, it was ENTIRELY due to a highly supportive group of people eagerly invested in my success. What a powerful phenomena to have at your back.
update: It was sorta hastily prepared, and my gosh, rewatching some if now years later there's a lot I wish I'd done better in the organization and clarity of some how how I presented. It just totally had elements of a standup routine, as many entertaining talks do. This is independent of the value, correctness, necessary truthfulness of the content, of course.
I believe it does! It was remote during covid, and I sorta dropped off, but I bet it's back in person! It's got really strong leaders and community around it.
That's a specific type of expectation confounding that comes from a dangling modifier. English is particularly good at creating these types of sentences and it leads to some of my very favourite jokes.
If the lady had said "Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research" there isn't any ambiguity in the sentence and then no joke.
Community used these to great effect. For example:
Britta: Yep, I’m getting serious. I got a backpack, got a new notebook. Oh, I got one of those see-through yellow pens so I can do that thing where you colour in the words.
My favorite bit is where they keep having the same food every day. It's sort of mentioned in passing here and there throughout the episode but not really foreground material. Then at the end of the episode, it's revealed the dean is learning Excel and accidentally pasted over the entire column with the same value.
Ah OK, I thought you thought they said Colombia initially, and I was wondering if you found something else in it funny.
Interestingly, to me, Colombia and Columbia don't sound the same, but I'm not a native speaker and I tend to think of words in terms of their spelling rather than their pronunciation.
Took me a very long time to get the highlight joke.
Britta thinks Shirley asks for the highlight of the things she got. Shirley thinks she’s telling Britta what that thing that you use to highlight text is called
Hm, is this really a dangling modifier? Something's a dangling modifier when its modificand is unexpressed or ambiguous, but "for cancer research" has a clear modificand, the noun phrase headed by "minutes".
Rather, I think this is just some ambiguity about what the "few minutes" are for.
The joke is that Cancer Research is a UK charity. Sparing a few minutes for them means listening to their pitch, but the author takes it to mean as it being for the lowercase cancer research, hence a few minutes do nothing.
If you had understood the joke in the first place, please unread all the above.
>"Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research"
Sure, I've left my two young kids and a puppy in a locked and closed car and it's a very, very, very hot day and I have 3 important things to do...can you?
I'm fascinated by stand-up comedy. I took a course a couple of years ago (online thanks to the pandemic) and it was so, so much harder than I expected it to be! By the end of the course I was nowhere near having a "tight five" that I was ready to perform in public.
I've continued to pay attention to it since, and it really is amazing how much skill and preparation it takes to put together anything that even comes close to being a decent performance.
Great stand-up comedians have inevitably spent hours of time refining every sentence that comes out of their mouths, despite their delivery sounding entirely natural and unrehearsed.
Just yesterday night I went to a comedy club in Paris that does standup comedy in English. It was an "improv special" where each comic has to improvise jokes based on random prompts displayed on a screen with a projector.
But yesterday, most comics bombed badly; out of 8, just one was actually good, and one passable; the others were terrible. But it's an incredibly difficult exercise, so much so that one has to wonder why you would put yourself through this.
It's certainly true that comedy is about writing and rehearsal and being analytical and having a fun look at the world; but it's also about quick wit, especially if one wants to interact with the audience.
It's like the restaurants where if you eat some massive 12 egg omelette you don't pay and you get your name on the wall - you go in knowing you'll likely fail; but if you win, you've won big.
I used to go see Carlin perform every August in Vegas. He was almost always working on new stuff and carrying a clipboard around with various jokes. It was really interesting to then watch his specials and see how the material developed.
> I used to go see Carlin perform every August in Vegas. He was almost always working on new stuff and carrying a clipboard around with various jokes. It was really interesting to then watch his specials and see how the material developed.
Was this in his early days, or his darker rant days?
Even in his darker period he was still a crafty orator, using rhyming, cadence and tonality so well.
He discusses this in many interviews over the years and many which were shown in is documentary. What's even crazier to think is that he was kind of a recluse and an introverted person, which is insane considering how much of a wildman he was for most of his career.
I tweeted a thing the other day about how there are surprising parallels between stand-up comedy and coming up with good questions for interviewing job candidates. In both cases there's a lot to be said for thinking VERY hard about the exact wording you are using, and the way in which the material is delivered. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1556277081691959296
I’ve taught at the high school level for about ten years. The mental process is familiar. I may teach the same lesson several times in a day, but there are constant alterations to pacing/phrasing depending on specific students in the room/time of day/personal assessment of how earlier phrasing landed/etc
I've been doing standup for just shy of 5 years. I started with a similar class, attended a lot of open mics, hosted several of my own mics, and produced shows. With covid I left SF and came back to Montana, which might seem like it would be bad for a comedy career, but in many ways it's easier to make headway here. The Punchline and Cobb's have so many eager comics that they can pick and choose and it's difficult to stand out. Here I'm a biggish fish in a teeny pond; I can rent a theater and fill it and make hundreds of dollars instead of the $25 I could hope for from shows in the city.
Of course sometimes you're still looking at empty rooms and empty tip jars or no ticket sales, but most of the time, I get to tell more jokes to a larger number of people and get more money at each show working in flyover country.
In the section “Don't Underestimate the Ruthless Competitiveness of Your Peers”, I had a totally different takeaway. I think it’s entirely possible that a set which kills among comedians may fall flat to a general audience.
Also, a high-stress environment (right before going on stage, right before going into battle) can get entirely different reactions than people sitting in a club sipping drinks.
There was a comedian once that was talking about the craft of stand up comedy, and he told a story about one of the favorite jokes he ever wrote. He was impressed with how well crafted and and smart the joke was. So he tries it out and every time it bombs with the audience. A more experienced comic watches him tell it, and after his set talks to him and feels the same way about how beautiful a joke it is. “It’s amazingly set up, wonderfully designed, incredibly smart. And it’ll never work. It’s too smart. Look, these people just got off work, and they just want to have a few drinks and have a few laughs. They’re not going to be interested in a joke that clever.”
You have a good open, but when you drop the 1912 line at the end of the opening bit, it's practically crying for a topper.
If there's anything in local history you find interesting that happened that year (or even better, in the previous two years), you could have played that against the stereotype of London buses always coming late and in groups.
Btw, I really want to congratulate you for having the courage to do a set. It takes a lot to perform comedy in front of an audience of strangers - with tech talks you at least have the slides as a crutch, but with standup, you have nothing to fall back on. You have a good grip on pacing, too. Please keep at it.
I went to college with a guy who ended up being a successful stand-up (multiple Netflix specials - level). He wasn't terribly funny in college - his brother was much, much funnier. Also watching his first bits on TV - first late night basic cable, then Letterman and Leno and then eventually his specials, he was not good at first and he was not a natural.
My big takeaway from that was that comedy, like many, many things is a skill that can be improved on with hard work. Undoubtedly there is some element of innate talent, but it is far less than I would have imagined before.
Comedy is also like other things - you may be good at it but it doesn’t mean you want to turn it into a career.
I’ve been asked at times if I had ever considered standup or doing some kind of comedy or joining in on things - but I am funny because I want to entertain people I like, not strangers. When I tell stories or bits to strangers to get a laugh - I don’t really get the same sense of pleasure out of it as I do with a group of friends.
I’ve considered being more intentional and getting very good at comedy but in some ways - I like the uncoordinated trial and error.
The ultimate victory in intra-sibling competition: Grinding comedy until you have a Netflix stand-up special and your naturally funny wise-cracking brother doesn't.
I believe that. Watching his specials is like watching someone who’s trying really hard to be funny and occasionally brute forces a laugh. He doesn’t come across as a naturally funny person like some other comics do.
True story: A few days back my wife and I were doing Wordle. I could tell the answer was “RUSTY”, her pet name for me. So I told her the answer was sitting right next to her and she says “No, STUPID is six letters.”
Well for comedy its patterns. You hear something once and its just a thing, the second time you hear it you remember the first time and you might chuckle, the third time your brain recognizes it as a pattern and building off the first two times you heard it and its, "funny".
I'm over simplifying but that is really the basis of a lot of comedy. Stand up less so. Most improv runs on the rule of threes though. It's an easy way to make something not funny at least a little funny.
Try it in a meeting or presentation sometime. Start with some goofy line or joke. Mention it again in the middle. Close with it. You'll probably get laughs. Even if its not that funny and got crickets the first time.
The three-act structure and the three-part setup are the same thing. You establish the premise, build-up the concept, then provide a payoff. “It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3”.
What’s the simplest way to represent most stories? You draw a line. It goes from point A to point B, start to finish, where the characters begin and where they end. There’s a whole lot of “middle” there too. What a coincidence, act two tends to be the longer one! Again, “1, 2, 3”.
How about the simplest way to count to (say) start a race? “Go” is unpredictable; “Ready, Go” is barely better; “Ready, Set, Go” gives you a clear cadence. 1, 2, 3. Beginning, middle, end.
As for images: humans are symmetrical with two eyes, we naturally divide the picture into two sides so you wouldn’t be impressed by a “rule of halves”. A rule of thirds is no more than a grid, one where there are clear sides and a middle to the image. A rule of fifths would also work, as would a five-act structure (which is a thing).
Three is the smallest number to which you can reduce a lot of concepts by establishing a pattern.
In the article the author talks about the 3rd element being the change in direction.
Geometrically if you have two points you can draw a straight line between them. Now you can put a third point almost anywhere else to change the shape from a straight line to something more unique, complex and unexpected.
Some comedians like Norm McDonald (moth joke, youthful porpoise joke) use dozens of straight line thoughts with one random one at the end. Norm was a great storyteller with lots of personality so he was able to keep the audience’s interest for minutes before delivering the change in direction. And he had a preexisting reputation so the audience was probably willing to wait longer for the hook.
It’s probably easier for most comics to do the bare minimum though which would be 2 cohesive thoughts and 1 unexpected one.
People inherently pattern match everything, looking for how it fits their worldview. Three points either lets you see the pattern and see everything fits it, or gives you enough setup to create payoff.
If you only do single setup plus payoff the audience may instead try to make the two fit together. If you give them two points of reference, it allows them to prebuild an assumed pattern with less work from the story/music/whatever for you to either play within or subvert.
An example of using just two to build patterns in the audience (but doesn't give a chance to subvert expectations per se) is cutting between shots in movies. The audience inherently tries to deduce the meaning of going from one image to a second. David Mamet has a great book, 'On Directing Film', that is not very long and talks about the shot transition version of this in great detail. You can use the ideas there and expand it to three to get into the ideas I've talked about above.
> Mathematically the minimum number of elements necessary for a pattern is three.
An assertion about mathematics requires a definition, and I don't believe this one for the usual definition of 'pattern'. For example, if I wanted to exhibit a linear pattern, two data points would be sufficient.
(But we're not talking about mathematical constructs anyway, so it's not clear what the relevance of mathematics is.)
2 points establishes local linearity, not global linearity. f(x) = x^2 looks linear if you take any 2 arbitrary xs, add a third and you can no longer draw one line that intersects all 3 points.
> 2 points establishes local linearity, not global linearity. f(x) = x^2 looks linear if you take any 2 arbitrary xs, add a third and you can no longer draw one line that intersects all 3 points.
Yes, certainly. And 3 points can show you a pattern that looks quadratic but isn't, and so on. More to the point, 3 points can rule out a claim of linearity, but they also cannot demonstrate a claim of linearity (e.g., you can usually find 3 collinear points on the graph of a cubic). My point was not to make a mathematical claim myself, but rather to argue that the claim "the minimum number of elements necessary for a pattern is three" is so vague to, I think, be nearly meaningless—and, in particular, unfalsifiable; in my mind, it doesn't deserve the adverb "mathematically".
Only on HN could a comment thread devolve from "light observation on the nature of comedy" to "arguing about the nature of linearity in mathematical equations" in 6 comments.
This is a very well written post. I liked it a lot.
Standup is something I want to try one day. I have a lot of respect for comedians. My gut instinct is that the personality and delivery plays a more important role than the content.
That sounds like a great course. What stood out to me is that the group is preparing for an actual show and gets real world experience in an environment with set audience expectations (ie. people coming to see a group of amateurs), which is a great way to go about it. I’ve seen improv courses here that basically are just a weekly workshop and then at the end you are on your own.
Back in the day, I used to frequent Comedy Cellar and I was there multiple times when Chris Rock was trying out his material in order to decide which jokes he would later use with his larger audiences.
IIRC when Rock tries out material, he deliberately speaks in a dull monotone. He's such a great performer that if he uses his normal standup instincts, he can get laughs off of weak material.
I love point 7 of “let the audience laugh”. I can totally see this being a pain point of not having a pause before your next joke. Pausing and silence is so powerful and is also exhibited in sales calls, and can drive suspense to the next joke or even a joke you’re in the middle of
When you land a punchline, you sweep the crowd for a few seconds. If you then start a new one before the laugh has finished, you are not just breaking the illusion of having told the joke to them - you are rudely interrupting them enjoying themselves.
Also: while laughing, the audience will miss the next feedline / lead. The joke you started during a laugh will not land well, no matter how good it might be.
I did a 6-week course early this year at the Angel Comedy. In the showcase, the joke of the show came in a young Danish-Chinese woman's set, and she played it perfectly. 25 seconds of laughter, in three rolling waves - and she had the guts to ride it through. All of us were congratulating her afterwards.
"You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps over the banana peel and disappears down a manhole."
—Charlie Chaplin
Laughter is the reaction to being surprised in a safe environment.
I thought your set was really funny. You established your character immediately, and then followed up perfectly with your first line which had everyone laughing from the start. I think people "got" it instantly which is why they even laughed at you rhyming off obscure facts about the bus system. Well done!
I've been interested in trying out standup in Meta Horizon Worlds - there's a bunch of comedy clubs you can visit. So far it hasn't really panned out as nobody is really seriously trying when I happen to visit. People go on stage and don't really do standup, and nobody pays attention.
“Monday, Tuesday, Banana”. The first two components, which create an expectation, are the set-up; and, the third that confounds the expectation is the payoff, or the punchline.
To take an example from Jimmy Carr.
A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day.
She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?"
I said, "All right, but we're not going to get much done.”
"Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?" is a thing people say when they're trying to get you to donate to cancer research charities. Jimmy interprets it instead as meaning she wants him to spend a few minutes doing actual cancer research himself (which would be unlikely to be very productive).
The lady meant to spare a few minutes to talk about cancer research, the punchline is misinterpreting that as a suggestion to do actual cancer research
> A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day.
She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?"
I said, "All right, breast is fine - but I draw th line at colorectal on the first date.”
Good read though the linked performance fell rather flat - it seem to be almost preternaturally obsessed with London bus routes, you would have to have an excellent set of diamond pickaxes to mine any worthwhile material from that particular domain and most of it barely warranted a chuckle from myself.
The self congratulatory estimating himself as one of the worst performers but coming out as one of the top three was a little hamfisted, and if that was honestly the case... I cannot even imagine what the other comedians used for material... a list of ones favorite mosaic bathroom tile patterns perhaps?
Comedy feels like writing, if you need to take a course it's probably just not for you.
I take a view that is pretty close to my HN username. Comedy is about pointing out weakness, and laughing is a reflex that you have when you recognize prey. PC comedy is about self-deprecation, where you pretend to be prey yourself in order to stimulate the audiences hunting instinct, rather than telling stories about prey or picking members of the audience to make look like prey.
The humor is in the hyperbole about how weak the prey is. The setup of a joke sets people up as a familiar level of prey, and the punchline is about someone (or everyone) in the joke being far weaker than you could have predicted. The punchline in this joke is about Jimmy Carr being stupid in a way that you wouldn't imagine someone could actually be.
This doesn't sound even a little right to me. That punchline is based on inversion of expectations, not self-deprecation. Certainly there seems to be some connection between laughter and an interrupted defense mechanism, but your version of it ("laughing is a reflex that you have when you recognize prey") doesn't make much sense. Why would we need a mechanism to avoid biting prey?
It would be much more plausibly viewed as a mechanism to avoid fighting rivals. As in: monkey A steals monkey B's banana, and monkey B bares his teeth to attack, but then, recognizing that monkey A is bigger and will kill him, monkey B evolves the behavior of laughing instead, as a way to dissipate the aggression and avoid a fight he will lose. Later, lower-status monkeys use humor as a way to gain status, because since laughter is equivalent to not-fighting, you can win or avoid a fight with a higher-status monkey by making him laugh.
That sounds a lot more believable, and it kinda-sorta comports with observation (e.g. it maps very neatly to medieval jesters getting away with making jokes about the King, or schoolyard bullying victims 'winning' if they can get the crowd laughing at the bully). But it's still a just-so story about evolutionary behavior, and by definition suspect as those are famously easy to gin up.
> That punchline is based on inversion of expectations, not self-deprecation.
The expectation is that Jimmy Carr is of normal intelligence and awareness. The joke that he is making is that he is not.
I don't buy the monkey story because laughing isn't generally defensive. If somebody attacks you and you laugh, they will attack you harder. To defend yourself with laughter, you point at a third-party and laugh, so maybe they'll think the third party is weaker than you.
You've misunderstood the monkey story. Laughter isn't the defense mechanism, it's the thing that interrupts the defense mechanism. The involuntary grin response doesn't happen when someone punches you, it happens when you feel attacked but also feel as if you can't react aggressively because of the social situation you're in.
Dissecting jokes is tedious and subjective but the sheer number of people disagreeing with you is telling. Jimmy Carr does a fair bit of self-deprecating humor but this one is pure "punchline subverts the expectation of the setup". It feels like you're working really hard to force this "woke=weak" thing in to a place where it doesn't remotely fit.
edit to add: and in cases where humor is aggressive or dismissive (e.g. jokes about gays, Polish people, blondes, etc) I think you'll find that "ingroup vs. outgroup" is a much better model than "predator vs. prey".
You’re welcome to your interpretation. You’re right because it’s your perspective and reality, but you should know, most people don’t think this way and it may have negative long term effects on your life and health.
It's true that people on the internet can't have light conversations about the nature of comedy without larping as psychologists, diagnosing people over the internet as severely damaged for having an opinion that they disagree with. We should really be able to have grown-up conversations without attempting to disqualify each other.
This does not resonate with me. I think this is more indicative of your internal psychology than any psychology of humor.
It sounds to me like you think in terms of prey and predator as a default metaphor: which informs me of how I should handle you as an agent - carefully.
If you reduce everything to animalistic tendencies - you start reacting that way: then people start treating you that way based on your actions... self fulfilling prophecy.
You might want to update you mental model of comedy - or provide a significantly more cogent argument for your view, as it was far from convincing - and frankly worrisome.
All in all it sounds like you are telling us how you respond to people you perceive as prey... which is... concerning that you view ANY human as prey...
I don't know what anti-humor is, but I'm a big fan of Neil Hamburger. The joke is that he's a terrible comedian who also has a bad temper and a bad personal life.
I'd argue that they all are. The target of every joke is someone painted as comically inept or weak. The only ways to subvert that is to aim it at yourself (which endears you to people), to aim it at the audience (which makes the audience feel that you are superior to them), or to aim it at the world in general (which makes you and the audience comrades against a stupid world.)
Sorry, I laughed. I'm astounded by how much the British like puns as opposed to Americans. I've heard British audiences audibly gasp at the high quality of a pun, like it took their breaths away.
Reductively I'd say the prey is the audience in that case, for not being smart enough to see it coming. The best puns are heavily telegraphed yet somehow totally unpredictable. They're clever mirrorings of things everyone is already familiar with, but still didn't see coming.
Bad puns aside, there’s many theories in the scientific literature (from cognitive psychology, linguistics and AI) that describe the mechanisms of puns (and many other types of jokes, really), and they mostly talk about deviations from a script/subverting expectations and norms (Hanks’ theory of norms)/accessing a non-default interpretation that is different from the default one (Giora’s optimal innovation hypothesis).
I don't think that unexpected things are necessarily funny. Unexpected stupidity or weakness is funny. Unexpected cancer isn't funny. To make it funny, you have to make someone stupid.
As you could imagine, the theories have that as a core idea, but are more detailed than that. Nobody ever thought that unexpected = fun.
Among other things, there’s different level of unexpected, something that bends the laws of physics (the cartoon character suspended in the air for a while before falling down) is more funny than, say, the character speaking japanese.
To criticise a theory it might help to read it first…
Did a similar 6 week class in standup many many years ago.
Two major things I learned were
a) you have to get the audience hooked in the first 20-30 secs or it gets much harder. Best example Emo Philips opening with “You know it’s really hard when you have to kill a family member because they are the devil. <Pause for laughter>. Other that it’s been a great day”. Now that’s a hook :-)
b) the concept of “laughs per minute” - ie there is a certain rate at which the laughs become self sustaining. It’s 3-4 laughs per minute. If you can keep that up for 2 mins the audience is in a state of laughter that keeps getting more and more intense. If you do less than 2 laughs a minute the energy drops between each laugh and you have to work really hard to bring it back to level. Key is to maintain a rate that results in a high ambient level of hilarity bordering with at least a couple of people cackling loudly and losing it.
Nevertheless when you do a successful set you feel like Superman when you walk off the stage.
Another good example is Louie Anderson's debut on Carson:
https://youtu.be/2bRe1CeGe7g
I remember watching this right after he died, and was blown away by how good he was. Not only does he get laughs right away, they're sustained. I went back and timed it, and his first 2 minutes on stage has 1 minute of audience laughter and applause. He nails all the things you mentioned, and has the whole audience roaring in under 3 minutes.
that was fantastic, but i feel it's cheating a bit when you just make fun of yourself for being fat for 3 straight minutes. If you took away the obesity, i wonder if it'd have been as easy for him to get laughs. The same thing happens when people harp on their ethnic quirks constantly in sets. Take that away and what else do you have?
I've noticed a pattern in comedians who have a funny set but never make it big. They have a shtick that works, lean into it, then end up using it as a crutch.
It doesn't scale to a funny second performance.
Then you get creative like Mark Normand (who looks like a garden variety white guy) but draws a lot from his settings and surroundings.
I don't blame people for using their physical idiosyncrasies or ethnicity to get their foot in the door. But you're right in that it only goes so far and you gotta evolve.
“Broad jump: Killed her.” is one of the most clever succinct jokes I have ever heard. Works even better because it’s the only pun in the sequence!
The first two minutes of the set are incredible.
This was a great read! I had a planned sabbaticle from work, scheduled to start in April, 2020, and I planned on studying/practicing standup at a local comedy place in Denver. Covid blew a hole in that, obviously, and I've not done it.
This all reminds me of a paper I've read, and think about regularly. The author, or others, might be interested. I've posted notes and a link to the paper here:
https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...
The argument is something like "when our expectations are subverted, and new visible order snaps into view, we feel satisfied and interested". Curiosity and expectation seems to play a large role in humor and standup.
Thanks for this article, Michael! I've subscribed via RSS! I am thankful to have found your website.
Was it Rise Comedy? I did the standup 101 class, it was a good time! I had fun with my showcase but definitely decided it wasn't for me. Totally recommend doing it, performing on an open mic for the first time(s) is such a wild experience that you won't get anywhere else :)
Thanks! :D
Really like the quote and your website. I've had a good play around with your "find a random blogger from Hacker News" project.
hey thanks! Since reading this post, I remembered that hands-down the best talk I ever gave had _quite a lot_ of humor in it, lots of it technical.
I'm quite proud of it, and as I've told other people about it, I specifically mention a "laughs per minute" rate of, for the first few minutes, an impressive rate! (It wasn't just my humor, definitely a group experience) I think it went great, in large part because it was a quite improvisational, reactive experience.
It feels _so_ strange to plug oneself's talk, but here we are:
https://josh.works/boulder_ruby_group
"Move Slow and Improve Things: Performance Improvement in a Rails App"
To the degree that it was successful, it was ENTIRELY due to a highly supportive group of people eagerly invested in my success. What a powerful phenomena to have at your back.
update: It was sorta hastily prepared, and my gosh, rewatching some if now years later there's a lot I wish I'd done better in the organization and clarity of some how how I presented. It just totally had elements of a standup routine, as many entertaining talks do. This is independent of the value, correctness, necessary truthfulness of the content, of course.
Does that Boulder group still meet? I used to go to the ones at Pivotal Labs years ago.
I believe it does! It was remote during covid, and I sorta dropped off, but I bet it's back in person! It's got really strong leaders and community around it.
[...]
I just used The Internet to answer this question - they're active, in person: https://www.meetup.com/boulder_ruby_group/?_cookie-check=0N7...
If you're still in town, check it out! I'm not in Denver at the moment, but hope to go again someday!
That's a specific type of expectation confounding that comes from a dangling modifier. English is particularly good at creating these types of sentences and it leads to some of my very favourite jokes.
If the lady had said "Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research" there isn't any ambiguity in the sentence and then no joke.
Community used these to great effect. For example:
Britta: Yep, I’m getting serious. I got a backpack, got a new notebook. Oh, I got one of those see-through yellow pens so I can do that thing where you colour in the words.
Shirley: Highlight?
Britta: Probably the backpack.
My favourite joke from Community:
I thought you got your degree online from Colombia?
Yes, but they want a real degree from America
My favorite bit is where they keep having the same food every day. It's sort of mentioned in passing here and there throughout the episode but not really foreground material. Then at the end of the episode, it's revealed the dean is learning Excel and accidentally pasted over the entire column with the same value.
This one might be the most appropriate since it's a joke about jokes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMT7MAnJna8
Columbia, not Colombia. That's the joke
Wait, now I'm really curious as to what you think the joke was.
Sorry, wrote my comment in a hurry. I understood the joke the same way everyone else did...
- he told people he got his degree from Col*mbia (both place names are pronounced the same)
- people (naturally) assumed he meant Columbia
- the punchline reveals that it was actually Colombia
- the punchline also hints that he got his degree by buying a certificate online, rather than doing bona fide online learning
Ah OK, I thought you thought they said Colombia initially, and I was wondering if you found something else in it funny.
Interestingly, to me, Colombia and Columbia don't sound the same, but I'm not a native speaker and I tend to think of words in terms of their spelling rather than their pronunciation.
In Spanish they sound different. In English, most people pronounce them both like “Columbia”.
Right. The two being pronounced the same is essential to the joke.
Took me a very long time to get the highlight joke.
Britta thinks Shirley asks for the highlight of the things she got. Shirley thinks she’s telling Britta what that thing that you use to highlight text is called
Hm, is this really a dangling modifier? Something's a dangling modifier when its modificand is unexpressed or ambiguous, but "for cancer research" has a clear modificand, the noun phrase headed by "minutes".
Rather, I think this is just some ambiguity about what the "few minutes" are for.
The joke is that Cancer Research is a UK charity. Sparing a few minutes for them means listening to their pitch, but the author takes it to mean as it being for the lowercase cancer research, hence a few minutes do nothing.
If you had understood the joke in the first place, please unread all the above.
>"Can you spare a few minutes to discuss supporting cancer research"
Sure, I've left my two young kids and a puppy in a locked and closed car and it's a very, very, very hot day and I have 3 important things to do...can you?
/FB cap doff, of course.
I'm fascinated by stand-up comedy. I took a course a couple of years ago (online thanks to the pandemic) and it was so, so much harder than I expected it to be! By the end of the course I was nowhere near having a "tight five" that I was ready to perform in public.
I've continued to pay attention to it since, and it really is amazing how much skill and preparation it takes to put together anything that even comes close to being a decent performance.
Great stand-up comedians have inevitably spent hours of time refining every sentence that comes out of their mouths, despite their delivery sounding entirely natural and unrehearsed.
Just yesterday night I went to a comedy club in Paris that does standup comedy in English. It was an "improv special" where each comic has to improvise jokes based on random prompts displayed on a screen with a projector.
T.J. Miller, of Silicon Valley fame, does it successfully in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxD6S-nEL_I
But yesterday, most comics bombed badly; out of 8, just one was actually good, and one passable; the others were terrible. But it's an incredibly difficult exercise, so much so that one has to wonder why you would put yourself through this.
It's certainly true that comedy is about writing and rehearsal and being analytical and having a fun look at the world; but it's also about quick wit, especially if one wants to interact with the audience.
/bitch-mode on
They do this in Paris precisely because they bomb - if they were any good, they'd be making money in an actual English-speaking country...
/bitch-mode off
It's like the restaurants where if you eat some massive 12 egg omelette you don't pay and you get your name on the wall - you go in knowing you'll likely fail; but if you win, you've won big.
I used to go see Carlin perform every August in Vegas. He was almost always working on new stuff and carrying a clipboard around with various jokes. It was really interesting to then watch his specials and see how the material developed.
> I used to go see Carlin perform every August in Vegas. He was almost always working on new stuff and carrying a clipboard around with various jokes. It was really interesting to then watch his specials and see how the material developed.
Was this in his early days, or his darker rant days?
Even in his darker period he was still a crafty orator, using rhyming, cadence and tonality so well.
He discusses this in many interviews over the years and many which were shown in is documentary. What's even crazier to think is that he was kind of a recluse and an introverted person, which is insane considering how much of a wildman he was for most of his career.
It was over the course of 10 years or so and I got to see the slow decline, sadly. His final years had really very few jokes (at least in Vegas).
Interesting. This sounds exactly like what’s been happening with me trying to get down talking about my startup.
I tweeted a thing the other day about how there are surprising parallels between stand-up comedy and coming up with good questions for interviewing job candidates. In both cases there's a lot to be said for thinking VERY hard about the exact wording you are using, and the way in which the material is delivered. https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1556277081691959296
I’ve taught at the high school level for about ten years. The mental process is familiar. I may teach the same lesson several times in a day, but there are constant alterations to pacing/phrasing depending on specific students in the room/time of day/personal assessment of how earlier phrasing landed/etc
Teaching is a kind of performance. I love that part. I need to get better at the marking/admin.
Where did you take the online course?
It was with Stanford continuing education.
I've been doing standup for just shy of 5 years. I started with a similar class, attended a lot of open mics, hosted several of my own mics, and produced shows. With covid I left SF and came back to Montana, which might seem like it would be bad for a comedy career, but in many ways it's easier to make headway here. The Punchline and Cobb's have so many eager comics that they can pick and choose and it's difficult to stand out. Here I'm a biggish fish in a teeny pond; I can rent a theater and fill it and make hundreds of dollars instead of the $25 I could hope for from shows in the city.
Of course sometimes you're still looking at empty rooms and empty tip jars or no ticket sales, but most of the time, I get to tell more jokes to a larger number of people and get more money at each show working in flyover country.
In the section “Don't Underestimate the Ruthless Competitiveness of Your Peers”, I had a totally different takeaway. I think it’s entirely possible that a set which kills among comedians may fall flat to a general audience.
Also, a high-stress environment (right before going on stage, right before going into battle) can get entirely different reactions than people sitting in a club sipping drinks.
Author here, you're right that this can happen.
There was a comedian once that was talking about the craft of stand up comedy, and he told a story about one of the favorite jokes he ever wrote. He was impressed with how well crafted and and smart the joke was. So he tries it out and every time it bombs with the audience. A more experienced comic watches him tell it, and after his set talks to him and feels the same way about how beautiful a joke it is. “It’s amazingly set up, wonderfully designed, incredibly smart. And it’ll never work. It’s too smart. Look, these people just got off work, and they just want to have a few drinks and have a few laughs. They’re not going to be interested in a joke that clever.”
Much respect for sharing a video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6miCy-nmXIY
I /really/ like that opener: "My favourite London bus is the 24".
The 24 is the best bus, by far. Pimlico to Hampstead Heath? Yes please.
Reminds me of a funny tweet someone posted early in the pandemic lockdowns, tweeted without any context given:
“Which burner is your favorite? Mine is back left.”
Front left.
Front right
makes the article legit to post the act. respect for sure
Haha thanks for linking!
You have a good open, but when you drop the 1912 line at the end of the opening bit, it's practically crying for a topper.
If there's anything in local history you find interesting that happened that year (or even better, in the previous two years), you could have played that against the stereotype of London buses always coming late and in groups.
Btw, I really want to congratulate you for having the courage to do a set. It takes a lot to perform comedy in front of an audience of strangers - with tech talks you at least have the slides as a crutch, but with standup, you have nothing to fall back on. You have a good grip on pacing, too. Please keep at it.
Made me laugh! :-)
It gave me a good chuckle. Bravo!
Decent set :)
I went to college with a guy who ended up being a successful stand-up (multiple Netflix specials - level). He wasn't terribly funny in college - his brother was much, much funnier. Also watching his first bits on TV - first late night basic cable, then Letterman and Leno and then eventually his specials, he was not good at first and he was not a natural.
My big takeaway from that was that comedy, like many, many things is a skill that can be improved on with hard work. Undoubtedly there is some element of innate talent, but it is far less than I would have imagined before.
Comedy is also like other things - you may be good at it but it doesn’t mean you want to turn it into a career.
I’ve been asked at times if I had ever considered standup or doing some kind of comedy or joining in on things - but I am funny because I want to entertain people I like, not strangers. When I tell stories or bits to strangers to get a laugh - I don’t really get the same sense of pleasure out of it as I do with a group of friends.
I’ve considered being more intentional and getting very good at comedy but in some ways - I like the uncoordinated trial and error.
> his brother was much, much funnier
The ultimate victory in intra-sibling competition: Grinding comedy until you have a Netflix stand-up special and your naturally funny wise-cracking brother doesn't.
Not a Higgins brother, was it? I went to school with Mike.
Jim Gaffigan.
I believe that. Watching his specials is like watching someone who’s trying really hard to be funny and occasionally brute forces a laugh. He doesn’t come across as a naturally funny person like some other comics do.
There is nothing occasion about the laughter when he’s on stage.
True story: A few days back my wife and I were doing Wordle. I could tell the answer was “RUSTY”, her pet name for me. So I told her the answer was sitting right next to her and she says “No, STUPID is six letters.”
I hope you have your name on a beret like in the movie European vacation
What is it about threes?
- The rule of thirds for visual imagery [1]
- Three-act structure for storytelling and plays [2]
- Three-part setup for stand up comedy [this article]
Rules for content often fall into a rule of threes, and I'd love to know why.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thirds
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure
Well for comedy its patterns. You hear something once and its just a thing, the second time you hear it you remember the first time and you might chuckle, the third time your brain recognizes it as a pattern and building off the first two times you heard it and its, "funny".
I'm over simplifying but that is really the basis of a lot of comedy. Stand up less so. Most improv runs on the rule of threes though. It's an easy way to make something not funny at least a little funny.
Try it in a meeting or presentation sometime. Start with some goofy line or joke. Mention it again in the middle. Close with it. You'll probably get laughs. Even if its not that funny and got crickets the first time.
The three-act structure and the three-part setup are the same thing. You establish the premise, build-up the concept, then provide a payoff. “It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3”.
What’s the simplest way to represent most stories? You draw a line. It goes from point A to point B, start to finish, where the characters begin and where they end. There’s a whole lot of “middle” there too. What a coincidence, act two tends to be the longer one! Again, “1, 2, 3”.
How about the simplest way to count to (say) start a race? “Go” is unpredictable; “Ready, Go” is barely better; “Ready, Set, Go” gives you a clear cadence. 1, 2, 3. Beginning, middle, end.
As for images: humans are symmetrical with two eyes, we naturally divide the picture into two sides so you wouldn’t be impressed by a “rule of halves”. A rule of thirds is no more than a grid, one where there are clear sides and a middle to the image. A rule of fifths would also work, as would a five-act structure (which is a thing).
Three is the smallest number to which you can reduce a lot of concepts by establishing a pattern.
In the article the author talks about the 3rd element being the change in direction.
Geometrically if you have two points you can draw a straight line between them. Now you can put a third point almost anywhere else to change the shape from a straight line to something more unique, complex and unexpected.
Some comedians like Norm McDonald (moth joke, youthful porpoise joke) use dozens of straight line thoughts with one random one at the end. Norm was a great storyteller with lots of personality so he was able to keep the audience’s interest for minutes before delivering the change in direction. And he had a preexisting reputation so the audience was probably willing to wait longer for the hook.
It’s probably easier for most comics to do the bare minimum though which would be 2 cohesive thoughts and 1 unexpected one.
It does not need to be three. It can be: set-up and then the punchline
Or less.
Jimmy Carr says that the shortest joke he's ever written is two words: dwarf shortage.
People inherently pattern match everything, looking for how it fits their worldview. Three points either lets you see the pattern and see everything fits it, or gives you enough setup to create payoff.
If you only do single setup plus payoff the audience may instead try to make the two fit together. If you give them two points of reference, it allows them to prebuild an assumed pattern with less work from the story/music/whatever for you to either play within or subvert.
An example of using just two to build patterns in the audience (but doesn't give a chance to subvert expectations per se) is cutting between shots in movies. The audience inherently tries to deduce the meaning of going from one image to a second. David Mamet has a great book, 'On Directing Film', that is not very long and talks about the shot transition version of this in great detail. You can use the ideas there and expand it to three to get into the ideas I've talked about above.
> Rules for content often fall into a rule of threes, and I'd love to know why.
I would like explicitly to appreciate your choice to give 3 examples.
Mathematically the minimum number of elements necessary for a pattern is three.
> Mathematically the minimum number of elements necessary for a pattern is three.
An assertion about mathematics requires a definition, and I don't believe this one for the usual definition of 'pattern'. For example, if I wanted to exhibit a linear pattern, two data points would be sufficient.
(But we're not talking about mathematical constructs anyway, so it's not clear what the relevance of mathematics is.)
2 points establishes local linearity, not global linearity. f(x) = x^2 looks linear if you take any 2 arbitrary xs, add a third and you can no longer draw one line that intersects all 3 points.
> 2 points establishes local linearity, not global linearity. f(x) = x^2 looks linear if you take any 2 arbitrary xs, add a third and you can no longer draw one line that intersects all 3 points.
Yes, certainly. And 3 points can show you a pattern that looks quadratic but isn't, and so on. More to the point, 3 points can rule out a claim of linearity, but they also cannot demonstrate a claim of linearity (e.g., you can usually find 3 collinear points on the graph of a cubic). My point was not to make a mathematical claim myself, but rather to argue that the claim "the minimum number of elements necessary for a pattern is three" is so vague to, I think, be nearly meaningless—and, in particular, unfalsifiable; in my mind, it doesn't deserve the adverb "mathematically".
Only on HN could a comment thread devolve from "light observation on the nature of comedy" to "arguing about the nature of linearity in mathematical equations" in 6 comments.
In that I agree. Maybe a better word is “normally” as in “normally don’t assume a pattern until you see 3 of them”
80/20 in sports, and a few other things.
Dick Van Dyke show: "Ask me what the most important thing is about comedy." "What's the most import..." "Timing."
The specific is always funnier than the general, as somebody once said.
This is a very well written post. I liked it a lot.
Standup is something I want to try one day. I have a lot of respect for comedians. My gut instinct is that the personality and delivery plays a more important role than the content.
That sounds like a great course. What stood out to me is that the group is preparing for an actual show and gets real world experience in an environment with set audience expectations (ie. people coming to see a group of amateurs), which is a great way to go about it. I’ve seen improv courses here that basically are just a weekly workshop and then at the end you are on your own.
Back in the day, I used to frequent Comedy Cellar and I was there multiple times when Chris Rock was trying out his material in order to decide which jokes he would later use with his larger audiences.
IIRC when Rock tries out material, he deliberately speaks in a dull monotone. He's such a great performer that if he uses his normal standup instincts, he can get laughs off of weak material.
I love point 7 of “let the audience laugh”. I can totally see this being a pain point of not having a pause before your next joke. Pausing and silence is so powerful and is also exhibited in sales calls, and can drive suspense to the next joke or even a joke you’re in the middle of
It's called "not stepping on a laugh".
When you land a punchline, you sweep the crowd for a few seconds. If you then start a new one before the laugh has finished, you are not just breaking the illusion of having told the joke to them - you are rudely interrupting them enjoying themselves.
Also: while laughing, the audience will miss the next feedline / lead. The joke you started during a laugh will not land well, no matter how good it might be.
I did a 6-week course early this year at the Angel Comedy. In the showcase, the joke of the show came in a young Danish-Chinese woman's set, and she played it perfectly. 25 seconds of laughter, in three rolling waves - and she had the guts to ride it through. All of us were congratulating her afterwards.
Somewhere I learned that comedy is about surprise.
I read somewhere that literally all humor stems from "incompatible frames of reference" and I thought that was interesting.
Frank Herbert said, “Laughter is a human reaction to non-lethal surprise.”
And he should know! The Dune series was so, so funny.
Muad'Dib we call instructor of boys.
Because being surprised is funny.
This is the best way to get a laugh:
"You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the fat lady and the banana peel together; then she steps over the banana peel and disappears down a manhole."
—Charlie Chaplin
Laughter is the reaction to being surprised in a safe environment.
From:
https://moviewise.substack.com/p/the-funniest-movie-scene
I thought your set was really funny. You established your character immediately, and then followed up perfectly with your first line which had everyone laughing from the start. I think people "got" it instantly which is why they even laughed at you rhyming off obscure facts about the bus system. Well done!
I've been interested in trying out standup in Meta Horizon Worlds - there's a bunch of comedy clubs you can visit. So far it hasn't really panned out as nobody is really seriously trying when I happen to visit. People go on stage and don't really do standup, and nobody pays attention.
Zoom open mics are a thing, if you’re looking to practice https://jokezoom.com/online-comedy-open-mics
If you like standup comedy you should watch the french standup comedy series from Netflix! Amazing cast and great throughout
https://www.netflix.com/fr/Title/81233911
I did a couple of 2 minute sets.
One went pretty damn well. The other got polite laughter at best.
Came away with a lot of respect for comedians. For me just coming up with 2 minutes of material was a challenge.
how many jokes does it take to change a light bulb?
Just one but it wasn't funny.
Is "learnt" an actual word?
Learnt is most commonly used in British English.
https://www.lexico.com/grammar/learnt-vs-learned
Yes, it's spelt correctly.
“Monday, Tuesday, Banana”. The first two components, which create an expectation, are the set-up; and, the third that confounds the expectation is the payoff, or the punchline.
To take an example from Jimmy Carr.
Your comment is nothing but a quote from the article. Why?
It's called the "rule of three". 2 examples to define a trend line, and the 3rd one to subvert expectations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)#Comedy
I'm dumb.. what's the punchline in that joke?
"Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?" is a thing people say when they're trying to get you to donate to cancer research charities. Jimmy interprets it instead as meaning she wants him to spend a few minutes doing actual cancer research himself (which would be unlikely to be very productive).
The lady meant to spare a few minutes to talk about cancer research, the punchline is misinterpreting that as a suggestion to do actual cancer research
> A lady with a clipboard stopped me in the street the other day. She said, "Can you spare a few minutes for Cancer Research?" I said, "All right, breast is fine - but I draw th line at colorectal on the first date.”
Good read though the linked performance fell rather flat - it seem to be almost preternaturally obsessed with London bus routes, you would have to have an excellent set of diamond pickaxes to mine any worthwhile material from that particular domain and most of it barely warranted a chuckle from myself.
The self congratulatory estimating himself as one of the worst performers but coming out as one of the top three was a little hamfisted, and if that was honestly the case... I cannot even imagine what the other comedians used for material... a list of ones favorite mosaic bathroom tile patterns perhaps?
Comedy feels like writing, if you need to take a course it's probably just not for you.
If you don't think that was an impressive _first-time_ performance from a comic you are massively under-estimating how difficult this is.
Agreed, bus lines aren’t nearly as funny as subway lines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
I take a view that is pretty close to my HN username. Comedy is about pointing out weakness, and laughing is a reflex that you have when you recognize prey. PC comedy is about self-deprecation, where you pretend to be prey yourself in order to stimulate the audiences hunting instinct, rather than telling stories about prey or picking members of the audience to make look like prey.
The humor is in the hyperbole about how weak the prey is. The setup of a joke sets people up as a familiar level of prey, and the punchline is about someone (or everyone) in the joke being far weaker than you could have predicted. The punchline in this joke is about Jimmy Carr being stupid in a way that you wouldn't imagine someone could actually be.
This doesn't sound even a little right to me. That punchline is based on inversion of expectations, not self-deprecation. Certainly there seems to be some connection between laughter and an interrupted defense mechanism, but your version of it ("laughing is a reflex that you have when you recognize prey") doesn't make much sense. Why would we need a mechanism to avoid biting prey?
It would be much more plausibly viewed as a mechanism to avoid fighting rivals. As in: monkey A steals monkey B's banana, and monkey B bares his teeth to attack, but then, recognizing that monkey A is bigger and will kill him, monkey B evolves the behavior of laughing instead, as a way to dissipate the aggression and avoid a fight he will lose. Later, lower-status monkeys use humor as a way to gain status, because since laughter is equivalent to not-fighting, you can win or avoid a fight with a higher-status monkey by making him laugh.
That sounds a lot more believable, and it kinda-sorta comports with observation (e.g. it maps very neatly to medieval jesters getting away with making jokes about the King, or schoolyard bullying victims 'winning' if they can get the crowd laughing at the bully). But it's still a just-so story about evolutionary behavior, and by definition suspect as those are famously easy to gin up.
> That punchline is based on inversion of expectations, not self-deprecation.
The expectation is that Jimmy Carr is of normal intelligence and awareness. The joke that he is making is that he is not.
I don't buy the monkey story because laughing isn't generally defensive. If somebody attacks you and you laugh, they will attack you harder. To defend yourself with laughter, you point at a third-party and laugh, so maybe they'll think the third party is weaker than you.
> The expectation is that Jimmy Carr is of normal intelligence and awareness. The joke that he is making is that he is not.
I'm pretty sure the joke is that you aren't going to get much done in "a moment" of Cancer Research.
Not that he's too stupid to do the research. He could be the world's foremost expert on Cancer Research and the joke is still funny.
You've misunderstood the monkey story. Laughter isn't the defense mechanism, it's the thing that interrupts the defense mechanism. The involuntary grin response doesn't happen when someone punches you, it happens when you feel attacked but also feel as if you can't react aggressively because of the social situation you're in.
Dissecting jokes is tedious and subjective but the sheer number of people disagreeing with you is telling. Jimmy Carr does a fair bit of self-deprecating humor but this one is pure "punchline subverts the expectation of the setup". It feels like you're working really hard to force this "woke=weak" thing in to a place where it doesn't remotely fit.
edit to add: and in cases where humor is aggressive or dismissive (e.g. jokes about gays, Polish people, blondes, etc) I think you'll find that "ingroup vs. outgroup" is a much better model than "predator vs. prey".
You’re welcome to your interpretation. You’re right because it’s your perspective and reality, but you should know, most people don’t think this way and it may have negative long term effects on your life and health.
That's condescending.
Do you have any suggestions on how to write it in a less condescending tone?
That's a very good observation.
and true
It's true that people on the internet can't have light conversations about the nature of comedy without larping as psychologists, diagnosing people over the internet as severely damaged for having an opinion that they disagree with. We should really be able to have grown-up conversations without attempting to disqualify each other.
This does not resonate with me. I think this is more indicative of your internal psychology than any psychology of humor.
It sounds to me like you think in terms of prey and predator as a default metaphor: which informs me of how I should handle you as an agent - carefully.
If you reduce everything to animalistic tendencies - you start reacting that way: then people start treating you that way based on your actions... self fulfilling prophecy.
You might want to update you mental model of comedy - or provide a significantly more cogent argument for your view, as it was far from convincing - and frankly worrisome.
All in all it sounds like you are telling us how you respond to people you perceive as prey... which is... concerning that you view ANY human as prey...
Every comment in this subthread is fucking weird. Stop making up a life for me in your head.
This seems rather reductive, honestly. What about anti-humor? That's still comedy. What about math jokes?
I don't know what anti-humor is, but I'm a big fan of Neil Hamburger. The joke is that he's a terrible comedian who also has a bad temper and a bad personal life.
Some of the more ancient philosophers might agree with you, but most don’t.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/355
That is one type of humor, and it does get great laughs when done well. However it also backfire getting you run out of town.
Notice that most of the examples of humor in this discussion are not that type.
I'd argue that they all are. The target of every joke is someone painted as comically inept or weak. The only ways to subvert that is to aim it at yourself (which endears you to people), to aim it at the audience (which makes the audience feel that you are superior to them), or to aim it at the world in general (which makes you and the audience comrades against a stupid world.)
Who's the prey in a good pun?
Not sure who the prey is, but everyone is the victim. :)
Sorry, I laughed. I'm astounded by how much the British like puns as opposed to Americans. I've heard British audiences audibly gasp at the high quality of a pun, like it took their breaths away.
Reductively I'd say the prey is the audience in that case, for not being smart enough to see it coming. The best puns are heavily telegraphed yet somehow totally unpredictable. They're clever mirrorings of things everyone is already familiar with, but still didn't see coming.
So… Prey tell?
Bad puns aside, there’s many theories in the scientific literature (from cognitive psychology, linguistics and AI) that describe the mechanisms of puns (and many other types of jokes, really), and they mostly talk about deviations from a script/subverting expectations and norms (Hanks’ theory of norms)/accessing a non-default interpretation that is different from the default one (Giora’s optimal innovation hypothesis).
For the interested reader, i suggest starting with Raskin https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110198492...
I don't think that unexpected things are necessarily funny. Unexpected stupidity or weakness is funny. Unexpected cancer isn't funny. To make it funny, you have to make someone stupid.
As you could imagine, the theories have that as a core idea, but are more detailed than that. Nobody ever thought that unexpected = fun. Among other things, there’s different level of unexpected, something that bends the laws of physics (the cartoon character suspended in the air for a while before falling down) is more funny than, say, the character speaking japanese. To criticise a theory it might help to read it first…