I’ll post updates as I encounter new comedy, theories or writing/blogs about either. So here’s one:
Sarah Silverman references relief/release theory explicitly in her 2017 Netflix special, A Speck of Dust. She builds a scene in which a girl is puking so hard she can’t stop and then she thinks she is about to get raped, but it turns out, she was just also crapping her pants. There’s a lot of silence as the story builds, but when the trick is revealed, the audience laughs, and Silverman acknowledges that this is exactly what she was trying to do.
