Comedy teacher, comic and writer Jerry Corley gives three reasons to develop your writing. They are:
- Writing Makes it Easier to Build Structure into your Material
- Get More Laughs
- Comedy Writing Enables you to Make More Money
He knows what he’s talking about, and I’d like to add an example and a few notes on why you should think about humorous modes – and the other theories I’ll write about – when writing. Because there’s a hard way and an easy way.
The Hard Way
There’s a stand-up comic working in my area, Matt Keck, who took a calculated approach. The idea was to make a viral YouTube video. So he watched a bunch of videos that had gone viral, tried to figure out what they all had in common. This is what scholars would call an inductive process, from examples to general rule). Then he made his video, and hit – if not comedy gold, at least comedy paydirt:
The video went viral and was picked up by Tosh.0. It also produced several parodies, references and spin-offs. As of today, the video has been viewed over 20.5 million times, Keck has gained over 35,000 subscribers, plus he was paid by Tosh.0, and continues to collect ad revenue. He done good.
Now, this is not to say it’s easy. This method is very hard, and doesn’t guarantee success. Just check out his other attempts, like the follow-up: I’m So Saucy. Yes, it benefits from the popularity of the first one, but was nowhere near as successful.
Why? There are a lot of possibilities. What he was doing was no longer novel, more videos like this were created between his two attempts, and we’d already seen that shtick, from him, before, etc. This is why Hollywood directors and studios cannot guarantee the success of any movie, though they are really trying. So I don’t recommend doing that much work.
The Easy (well, Easier) Way
The easier way is to find the general strategies that work and use them. Again, they don’t always work, and the same tricks won’t work the same way for different comics, or even necessarily for the same comic twice, but that’s what keeps it interesting. Most people serious about the craft are already doing this.
Comics talk about humor all the time, in podcasts and interviews – I’m looking to compile and break down a number of those for later posts – but our conversations don’t often discuss the scholarly research in the area. Humor classes sound like a good idea, but they get a bad rap because some of them are rip-offs.
It’s frustrating to me when I listen to comics and comedy teachers talk about writing and see that they are implicitly referencing the scholarly theory, but they miss aspects of it. It’s like a failing grad-student read the paper and thought, “There’s a market for this!” Then dropped out and ran with it. They gussy it up with fancy, buzz-word terms and make it their own, but most of them are saying the same things based off an imperfect understanding of a bigger idea that’s older than Aristotle.
So that’s why I’ve started this blog: Partly to organize my thoughts on the theories and their applications, partially to get me reading and writing every day, but mostly to get stuff that is public and free into the hands of those who can use it – and to convince you that you do need it. In short, to promote better comedy.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
I’d love to hear about (and not pay for) what people are learning, and try to explain them via the bigger theories.
Have you taken a comedy class? Was it different than any other composition (writing) class? How? What did you learn?
Catchphrases or repeated phrases can also define a voice and persona (think of Rodney Dangerfield’s “I get no respect”). Further, while it’s generally a bad thing in comedy to have your punchline just be “Fuck!” – or any other taboo word – that’s what we call a ‘”dick joke” (Borns), if there’s more to the joke than that, adding a “fuck” in here or there can help it along. Just don’t lean too hard on these. Keep in mind, if you want to do corporate gigs, they often won’t hire people who are too blue. So choose wisely.
I hear critiques of comics, most recently of Louis CK, that “he seemed to be rambling,” through his first abortion joke. They don’t seem to realize, that’s a style, something he’s doing on purpose, and something he had to work really, really hard to get just right. And we don’t talk about that enough with outsiders.
Paul Reisner says he starts with a funny, one-liner or “nugget,” and if the audience bites, he expands on it spontaneously and organically (Borns). That’s definitely something to aspire to, but I don’t find it to be the norm.
Incongruity Theory is based on Aristotle’s (and Cicero’s and others’) view of humor as derived from expectancy violation. Proponents of this view include James Beattie, George Campbell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, and Henri Bergson.
Aristotle thought humor occurred when one creates an expectation in the audience and then violates it (3, 2; Morreal). The Roman teacher Cicero similarly said, “The most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh.” (ch. 63; Morreal).
These “expectancy violations” also work when a situation cannot be reconciled, or is paradoxical. In these cases, we laugh as a sign that we have given up on reconciling the incongruous. As Immanuel Kant puts it, “In everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction). Laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” (First Part, sec. 54; Morreal).
A more modern take is that incongruity is a surprising relationship between two things thought to be disparate (an exercise of wit), or a distinction between two things thought to be the same (an exercise of judgment); in both cases, a “difference between what one expects and what one gets, a lack of consistency and harmony” (Berger, 8).
Incongruity theory is the reigning “champion” of the three major theories, as it explains many more diverse forms of humor than the other two (Superiority and Tension Release), including puns and word play. More recently, some authors have labeled the convergence in humor of two possible interpretive frameworks bisociation, and use it to discuss a distinct 
Things like puns and wordplay may not have deep political overtones. However, Kenneth Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” also might productively fit here, which allows for the possibility that by placing two disparate ideas in conversation (wit), new aspects of both come to light. By the same token, judgement can bring up differences in things thought to be similar. Thus humor may be used to provoke thought.
Sometimes called the “Tension Release Theory,” this is Freud’s (and others’) view that humor is derived from a release of pent up energy.
John Morreall traces this theory back to Lord Shaftesbury’s 1709 “hydraulic” model, which held that men (sic) had “natural, free [“animal”] spirits” that required release or they would “vent” in undesirable ways. Apparently, we’re all seething cauldrons of fluid and gas, trying to get out and making us wacky. Variations of this theory come from John Dewey, Herbert Spencer and Sigmund Freud.
Perhaps most popular is Freud’s notion that people laugh when they satisfy “an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way” (101). Freud relates those instincts to his theory of unconscious desire, particularly for aggression and sex, though this has been expanded to all taboos (including scatological [potty humor] or breaches in decorum [like obscenity]). The obstacle in these cases is most frequently the conscious, an effect of socialization. Humor occurs as a release of tension when we realize that we are allowed to delight in (previously) taboo matters (again, primarily violence and sex).
Socrates/Plato’s (and others’) view of humor as derived from ridicule. The forms usually attached to this mode of humor are irony, parody, and satire, which expose and possibly correct human problems and failings.
Many people attribute to Aristotle the idea that “comedy is based upon ‘an imitation of men worse than average,’” though this quotation developed post-Aristotle by scholars who had read his writing on comedy prior to its disappearance (Berger, 7 n3). However, perhaps also in this vein, Aristotle says in The Rhetoric (2, 12), that wit is educated insolence; perhaps the whole thing is a ruse, a trick or a facade meant to entertain.
A more modern take is offered by Thomas Hobbes, who states that laughter is “a sudden glory, arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (Chapter ix, § 13; Morreall, Humor). It is this recognition of people’s ability to change and therefore laugh at our former ignorance or infirmity that really makes the theory applicable in a lot of situations.
Instead, we should allow the word to change meanings with use; basically that writing the word when talking about it is not the same as calling someone one.