What makes something funny?

I think the simplest description of humor is “deviation without harm.” Comedy is the unexpected, the unfathomable, the pattern outside of the usual pattern. The “without harm” part is key too. You can comically volley many things with tennis rackets, for instance: golf balls, beach balls, ben-wa balls, whatever. This is a deviation from an expected behavior, and is comedic on some level. But if you volley a baby, it isn’t funny.

However, if you just got a chuckle out of the description of baby-racketing, that’s because no baby was volleyed, and the notion is so far out of whack with what we consider normal, that it can be funny just to say.

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die” – Mel Brooks

When something is true, but certainly goes unsaid, hearing it said aloud. For instance, hot dog buns, and hot dog packs uneven packaging quantities.

Note: This is more of an opinion question. No research needed. Didn’t want to put in social section because I want it to stay on topic.

Scripted comedy is all about wit and timing.

I wish I could give more than that, but I really can’t. Cheesy Mel Brooks comedy, Lewis Black stand-up, and physical Three Stooges comedy are all the same in that respect. Wit and timing.

pretty hot, @Smashley I like it.
and I laughed my ass off at that baby racketing!

I was going to say it has something to do with “shock”.. but I think deviation explains how that works well.

I work as a stand-up comic and have thought a lot about this question. The most salient thing that comes to mind is: It’s funny when you put together 2 things that don’t belong together (e.g. using a large donut as a hat, talking about death in a very light-hearted way, etc.) . A lot of humor across cultures is based on disparate concepts being forced together. It tickles the brain.

Humor: an unexpected change in the level of abstraction.

Not that that’s any help in writing a script.

If you really want a funny script, here’s what I’d do:

1. Find the funniest person you know.
2. Have them write it.

babies and racquets… could be funny… just have to get the right opponents… like Barry Bonds and Octomom

@6rant6 My friends and I are writing it together, I think we’re pretty funny but I also think there’s a difference between on-screen humor and real life humor. We could collab with other funny people too.
But we come up with jokes a lot and we’re like “That should be in the series” and we write it down. We’re not sure if that would be funny in the series or if it was just funny in real life.

I know what makes me laugh is when there’s a disconnect between what is expected and what actually happens.

As a sketch writer, I’ve found that there are two modes of how to get to the funny: the “normal” character in a crazy situation and the “crazy” character in a normal situation.

They say comedy = tragedy + time, but it can’t be humongous social tragedy until at least a few hundred years have passed. OTOH, there’s the dumb guy in a wheelchair who couldn’t accept that he missed the elevator, bashed open the doors with his chair and the fell down the shaft and died, well, that was just one Darwin Award winner who got what was coming to him, so that’s funny. Sick, but funny. What happens in real life that’s funny to me is when I do (or someone else does) something embarrassing that, in retrospect, we know made us look silly and could’ve cause (and sometimes did cause) social opprobrium.

If everyone more or less agrees on what’s socially appropriate, any exaggeration of that, for good or bad, can be funny. There’s a reason why this is one of Eddie Murphy’s most famous bits of comedy.

A number of people have mentioned the unexpected, or deviation or putting together things that don’t belong together. It’s a form of absurdity.

Under the orange tree.

Phew! Got that out of the way.

But there’s another aspect which is culture. Things that are unexpected are culturally specific. It has to do with what you are used to living with, and of course those things are different in different cultures.

So to be funny, you have to be very knowledgeable about your culture. You have to know everything. You have to make connections between all kinds of weird stuff.

And it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s in real life or on a screen. The screen humor will always be stupider.

@wundayatta I agree that shared cultural knowledge is the foundation of something being funny.

Look at the many disciplines and stylings of comedy, what do they all have in common timing.

;-)

I think…. well, first of all, you should establish the audience it is for, and write humor at their level. For example, a child would find a jelly fish landing on a man’s head out of nowhere, funny, while a man fresh out of university with first honor would say there wasn’t much thought put into it.
But all of it (maybe with the exception of kiddy humor) requires wit and timing.
If you want people like you to read it, then I think you can just use things that you found funny, and incorporate it in?
You might also want to ask other people around, about things that were funny, rather than finding a kind of ‘funny hand-book’. because I think humor is more of a spontaneous thing.

In line with what others have said, I have seen people say that an essential part of humor is being able to interpret something in two different ways. This could be expected versus actual. It could also be a play on words, where there are two different ways of interpreting a statement. Humor is one of those things that you can’t define exactly, but you can recognize it when you see it. There are things that we may not find funny, but which we recognize as intended to be humorous. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to program a computer to create jokes. I think it could be done, but that the jokes would not be very good.

With regard to the distinction about things that are funny on screen versus real life, we have a greater tolerance for blatant stupidity, crudity or violence on screen than we do in real life. There are things that imaginary characters can get away with that real people cannot.

One of the distinctions between being funny and writing funny is that writing is structured. You don’t have a choice about it. There is a beginning a middle and and end. Your characters start a journey, travel, and end it. Whether you write those things well or not…that’s another matter.

If you don’t have a good story to start with, you’re kind of dressing up a pig by putting in lots of jokes. Yes, some people will tune in just to watch people being clever – but not many. As evidence, I point to Who’s Line Is It Anyway – absolutely brilliant performances, huge jokes, but it never really made a dent.

So what’s your story? Who are your characters? What do you have to say?

@6rant6 We got the characters and plot down, just asking about incorporating humor into it. I guess if you make funny characters with funny traits the comedy will write itself as you write the story. The reason for my question is to make the funny characters/traits. So, I’m willing to change the characters and the plot outline we have already if it means we can make a funnier series.

If your group includes performers, you might try improving some of the scenes. If you set up one person to set up the scenes, and challenge the others to one up each other, you can develop material and characters.

Someone who writes good comedy can help you ‘punch up” your script after you have a draft. You can also go through each eighth and rewrite until each has something funny in it. Writing is rewriting, as they say.

Callbacks, strong personal voices, overwhelming thwarted desires are necessary components.

One theory of comedic characters says that each character is one of three types:
1. Baby
2. Robot
3. Animal

You could hold each of your characters up to that standard, and make them more extreme in the archetype they represent.

Yep, it’s all in ti….....

Another technique is to go into great detail when it is normally expected to be vague and generic. Like a mayor making all of the street crossing signs have realistic faces. The more excessive the detail the funnier it is.

….................., wait for it.

@rebbel Tedium?

…ming.

Still waiting, rebbel – it’s been 17 fucking hours.

@rebbel Aight, funny stuff man. I think we all get it. I’ve been sitting here all day, waiting and I’ve got better things to do. Peace.