Three elements make up the situation: characters, environment, and events. One, two, or all of these will need to be comedic in order to make the humour work. It’s possible that none of these elements separately could be comedic, but by bringing together the peculiarly disparate, comedy still ensues. However, I suspect that only works because characters start over-reacting, thereby making them comedic.

Characters

When you are performing on stage you will always be playing a character of some sort, even if that character is a humorous version of yourself. Rarely in situational comedy do you have a normal character, they will always be an exaggeration, even if it’s subtle. A character that is maintaining a sense of propriety in an out of control situation is demonstrating super-human abilities in remaining calm. Background characters who are serving as props to the main characters can be normal. Once a character gets entangled in a comic situation, they lose normality.

In Francis the Talking Mule you might be tempted to think that Peter Stirling (Donald O’Connor’s character) is the straight. After all, the talking mule is what makes the situation comic. You would be wrong. Francis delivers the straight lines and Peter over-reacts. Even Peter’s eventual acceptance of this absurdity is fantastic. Stand-up routines with puppets will often take this route.

Of course simply putting together apparently normal characters with widely varying agendas will create a similar humour without having to be quite so fanciful. Kindergarten Cop derives its humour from tough guy Arnold Schwarzenegger interacting with children. Cops are part of our normal experience. Children are part of our normal experience. A police officer trying to get the cooperation of a room full of five year-olds creates exaggerated misunderstandings and strange solutions.

Environment

Environment can be used to create “fish out of water” situational comedy. The Mr Bean series frequently uses this trope, but most especially in the movie Mr Bean’s Holiday. The title character wins a vacation to France. Early on in the film “fish out of water” is made literal by Mr Bean encountering an expensive French seafood platter and not knowing what to do with it. He is given instruction on how to eat the oysters. Sadly, he finds them nauseating and so pretends to consume them. The results are a lap full of oysters in need of disposal. Each step in this scene has its humorous consequences which leads to the next series of humorous consequences.

The film Galaxy Quest involves a story about actors who play space travellers suddenly having to confront actual space travel. They know how to deal with their fictional world on a television set, but have to draw on unusual personal resources to deal with the real thing. Role reversal stories also carry an element of environmental humour: a pauper having to cope with the complexities of royal living, a parent suddenly having to confront technological challenges teenagers take for granted.

A comedic situation brought about by a shift in environment involves exploratory and “sensawunda” humour. A character is in an unfamiliar place, they check out the objects, foods, vegetation, and people. From their ignorance they are placed in a childlike status and will make childlike mistakes, though perhaps to a monumental scale.

Events

Unexpected and outrageous events are the soul of situational comedy. They are what pump up the funny. The film Baby’s Day Out is set in the city and is a story about a child being kidnapped from rich parents for ransom. This could easily be a drama or thriller, except events lead us elsewhere. The baby sees a bird which it follows out onto the ledge of a tall building. When the baby crawls onto a two by four, it safely crawls across to another building and escapes. The movie is then a series of one unlikely event that rescues the baby after another.

A standard fantasy storytelling form is the quest. The Lord of the Rings features the quest to destroy the “one ring”. Other quests include to kill a dragon, rescue a princess, or retrieve a magical item. Each of these quests usually requires a certain set of steps in order to achieve their end. This structure easily provides opportunities for comic vignettes from each step/event. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure features Bill and Ted questing for historical figures who can help them complete a history project at school. The process of gathering each figure leads to laughable misunderstandings and mishaps.

Raconteurs such as Bill Cosby, Garrison Keillor, and Ed Byrne love playing with this aspect of situational comedy. One of the most amazing live comedy experiences I’ve had was hearing Ed Byrne tell a story about his girlfriend while intertwining it with the story of Cosi Fan Tutte. One event after another paralleled each other, until Ed brought the story to a spectacular operatic culmination.

Conclusions

Entire shows have been successfully made focusing only on physical, verbal, or situational comedy. A certain special pleasure comes when a skilled storyteller manages to combine all three. Such classics as The Princess Bride or The Pirates of Penzance come to mind. It’s well worth the effort to try each yourself, just to see what new places it may take you as a writer/performer.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Types of Comedy: Part One – Physical Comedy
Types of Comedy: Part Two – Verbal Comedy

One big surprise was that the kids didn’t have a solid grasp on the concept that a story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. This sounds obvious, because anything that exists in time automatically has these things, but not in the sense of creating a coherent story. So we had to discuss what makes up a beginning, what makes up a middle, and what an end. I will probably write an article about this in the near future.

The other discovery was that in going through my comedy elements, I seemed to have missed one widely used comic trope: frustrated ambition.

Frustrated ambition is where comic characters are overly focussed on attaining a goal, and are repeatedly foiled in their attempts to achieve it.

This often relies on exaggeration, one of our other elements. The comic character’s desire for their goal is inflated. So much so that they lose perspective on why they want this goal, whether or not they really need it, or if perhaps something better might be achieved by shifting their goal, and will take extreme measures in their pursuit. Sometimes they have lost sight of their true goal by getting overly caught up in a particular obstacle.

Probably the most classic example of frustrated ambition is Wile E Coyote. Wile E is portrayed as a scrawny desert coyote. However, he doesn’t seem to need the roadrunner for food. Otherwise, he might be willing to shift his goal from catching a roadrunner to catching anything edible. No, our coyote is a proud fellow who revels in his intellect. He must catch the roadrunner in order to establish his cunning and superiority. His desire is great, but his need is trivial…this is from where much of the humour arises.

The film Mousehunt is about two brothers who are doing all they can to rid their house of a mouse. They both start out with the reasonable desire of wanting to reclaim their lives after losing their jobs. That goal shifts to one of greed when they inherit a house that could be worth millions, then further shifts to eradicating a mouse when it seems to be in the way of their greed. The brothers get further and further away from what they need by losing perspective and fixedly following what they want. Their desire is great, their need is great, and they easily get caught up in trivialities.

In Buster Keaton’s short film “One Week”, what Buster and his onscreen bride want is to build their first home using a kit. However, one of her old beaus seeks revenge by changing the numbers on the kit boxes. We the audience know that Buster and his bride’s efforts are now doomed, but they don’t. The humour comes from the surprising ways in which their attempts to build the house fails and our empathy with their frustration in coping with a DIY project.

Frustrated ambition is the comic element that lends itself most to parables. We experience comic characters’s skewed viewpoint, and find humour in recognising how they are missing a bigger and more sensible picture. Mind you with Wile E Coyote some people come away inspired by Wile E’s humanity and indomitable spirit. “If Wile E can keep at it, despite the seeming impossibility of his task, then so can I…”

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

The jokes themselves are largely about playing with language. Even when a joke is about the absurdity of some aspect of life, like companies pandering to the health-conscious without making an effort, it might be done through an oxymoron such as “all natural artificial flavouring.”

This means that verbal comedy does not alway translate well from one language to another. However, it’s not impossible. Puns exist in Japanese as well as English. So if you wanted to perform in Japan in Japanese, you would have to do some research to create different puns for your routine. Many Japanese parents joke that their children are kawaii/kowaii: the one word means “cute” and the other “scary”. The words sound similar and, yes, children are often both cute and scary.

So here are some categories and examples of verbal humour.

What You Say

It may seem obvious that WHAT you say is crucial to verbal comedy, but remember that not everyone knows HOW to tell a joke to make it funny. I will deal with that later in this post.

Overstatement and Understatement

These are forms of exaggeration that often work with other types of verbal humour such as simile. Types of overstatement and understatement include:

Hyperbole—exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally. “The baby weighed a ton.” “She was as light as a feather.” However, sometimes the humour comes from saying something that sounds like hyperbole, then demonstrating that it is fact. “The baby weighed a ton; not surprising since it was twelve foot by twelve foot at birth.” We could be talking about an elephant, whale, or an outrageously large human baby.

Meiosis—a euphemism that understates a situation. “The Pond” as a reference to the Atlantic. “It’s just a flesh wound” said when a knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail has his arms and legs hacked off.

Litotes—Using a double negative to express a positive. This is very popular in Australia. “(S)he’s not half bad” referring to a good-looking person. “Gran’s not unhappy with the move” could mean Gran likes the new place. However, Australian humour being what it is, this could be meiosis and she’s spitting mad.

Poetic Language

Calling this type of comedy “poetic” may cause people to think we’re getting hoity-toity. But isn’t the very word “hoity-toity” funny? And it’s a rhyme. Poetic language gives a lovely texture to comedy, adding an extra layer of pleasure when you are playing with sounds and rhythms as well as meanings.

Rhyming—when words sound the same. You can have both full rhymes and half rhymes. Full: kitten/bitten. Half: ladies/bodies. Cockney slang is based on rhymes. Many people have heard “apples and pears” as the Cockney slang for “stairs”. Dr Seuss created humour by inventing absurd words to fill in a rhyme.”When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles…they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.” (Fox in Socks) Ever hear of “tweetle” before? Lewis Carroll is famous for absurd rhyme, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

Alliteration, assonance, consonance—These all deal with same individual sounds. Alliteration is when all the initial sounds are the same, as in “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Assonance is when you repeatedly use certain vowel sounds, “I like white tires, they slice ice with wide files.” Consonance is when you repeatedly use certain consonant sounds, “The putrid dappled donkey galloped wide of the dandelion field.”

Onomatopeia—when a word sounds like the thing it is describing. A steak “sizzles”. A child “hiccups”. I will warn people, many words are only considered onomatopeia because of cultural expectations. In English we say, “meow” for a cat, “hoot” for an owl, and “woof” for a dog. But in French you would say, “miaule”, “hulule”, and “vaf”. In China the dogs go “wang wang”.

Simile/Metaphor—making a comparison. Similes frequently use the words “like” or “as”: her eyes were like sapphires. Metaphors will describe something by calling it something else: her eyes were sapphires. Similes and metaphors are a particular favourite for creating comedy. Rowan Atkinson was regularly using them as Black Adder: “Since then, we’ve made as much ground as an asthmatic ant with a heavy load of shopping.”

The Misuse of Language

We all enjoy laughing at a slip of the tongue. Sometimes it is used to show a character is flustered, foolish, or perhaps drunk.

Malapropism—accidentally swapping words with similar sounds and sometimes creating a humourous new meaning. Stan Laurel, “We heard the ocean is infatuated with sharks.” (instead of “infested”) In New Scientist an office worker described a colleague as “a vast suppository of information”. (instead of repository) When the worker apologised for his “Miss-Marple-ism” New Scientist reported it as possibly the first time “malapropism” has been turned into a malapropism.

Spoonerisms—transposing letters between words. When someone meant to say “Is it customary to kiss the bride?” and instead says “Is it kisstomary to cuss the bride?”, you might assume they are extremely nervous or drunk. The phrase is funny, but so is the vulnerability that it reveals. One of my favourites was a British announcer saying, “All the world was thrilled by the marriage of the Duck and Doochess of Windsor.” Ducks are funny.

Mondegreens—Mishearing words in a phrase and replacing them with close sounding words. The one I’m guilty of is mishearing the song “Kyrie Eleison” as “Carry a Laser”. Others include: “There’s a bathroom on the right” for “There’s a bad moon on the rise” and “‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy” for “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky” from Purple Haze.

Play on Meaning

Puns—when words sound like one another but have different meanings and/or when words look like one another and have different meanings. “I did a theatrical performance about puns. Really it was just a play on words.” In this case the word “play” both looks and sounds the same in the two senses it is used, but the punchline relies on meanings of either “play” meaning theatrical production or “play” meaning a game. Tom Swifties are a pun based on the description of how something is said. “We just struck oil!” Tom gushed. “Pass me the shellfish,” said Tom crabbily. I would classify “syllepsis” as a form of pun, though it relies solely on the different ways a verb can be used. Michael Flanders wrote in “Have Some Madeira M’Dear”, “She lowered her standards by raising her glass, her courage, her eyes and his hopes.”

Euphemisms—a way to delicately describe something that might be considered offensive. “Airbrush your undies” for farting. “Reviewing today’s menu” for burping.

Double entendre—most often sexual innuendo, but any straightforward statement that has a second potentially offensive meaning. Puns are frequently used for this: “A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.” These only work if you are familiar with various euphemisms. So, it requires some knowledge of common spoken culture: “hole” for “asshole” or “anus”. In the movie Naked Gun Leslie Nielsen’s character famously appears to be looking up Priscilla Presley’s dress and comments, “Nice beaver”. She then passes him a taxidermied beaver.

Oxymoron—a pair of words, often adjective-noun, that are apparently paradoxical. Well known oxymorons are bitter sweet, living dead, and virtual reality. George Carlin is well known for making a humorous case that military intelligence, business ethics, and freedom fighters are oxymoronic.

Non sequitur—a factual statement followed by an absurd conclusion. “If the sun is 23 degrees off of high noon, and we haven’t had daylight savings yet, I would say it’s time for an ice cream.” Ralph Wiggum from the Simpsons: “Martin Luther King had a dream. Dreams are where Elmo and Toy Story had a party and I was invited. Yay! My turn is over!”

Paraprosdokian—Hah! Say THAT one fast. This is basically a word that describes the one liner: a statement that ends with a surprise. The two part one-liner is a simple setup and payoff joke: “I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it,” Groucho Marx. Slightly more complex is the introduction, validation, violation joke: “Every successful date will include three things–romance, respect, and a ton of chocolate.”

How You Say It

Timing is certainly an important part of verbal comedy. You don’t want to rush into a punchline, because people need a moment to be prepared for the full impact of your surprise ending. You don’t want your pacing to be too slow, or people may lose interest in what you have to say. Understanding where to put emphasis through starts, stops, and pauses is tightly linked to comic characterisation.

Prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Take a simple phrase like, “Could you please smile.” Someone about to take a photograph might say this in a calm even tone. “COULD you please smile,” might be said in a way that indicates frustration and anger. If you add a tight smile to the person saying this, a certain irony creeps in. “Could YOU please smile,” indicates a particular person is called upon to smile. “Could you PLEASE smile,” is begging. “Could you please SMILE,” indicates that people are doing something else, like crying or arguing.

Sarcasm is when you say one thing and mean something entirely different. Often prosody is involved to make the sarastic intent clear. “I am SO happy you invited me,” may be how someone sarcastically expresses being unhappy about an invite. The emotion expressed in the reverse may be funny in itself…a bit of vocal absurdity. However, humour may also be derived from the fact that we understand the subtext, when others do not. If the inviter doesn’t recognise the sarcasm of the invitee, that person may inflict more unwelcome invites.

Mimicry is when you imitate the speech characteristics of another person. This can be done in a cheeky manner, whereby the comedian is directly sending-up the person with whom they are speaking. It may be used to emphasise the strangeness of foreign accents. A comedian can also be caricaturising public figures by exaggerating their speech habits. People enjoy the sense of recognition. They also enjoy some of the mockery.

Funny voices takes mimicry to a meta level. The comedian extracts those elements of speech that we find funny no matter to whom we apply them: high voices, low, voices, fast-talking, slow-talking, mispronunciations, etc. You don’t even need words. The space aliens in Sesame Street are well-loved for their nonsensical alien speech.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t exhausted this subject. I hope you find enough here to start playing around and using maybe a few twists of language you haven’t tried before. Verbal comedy is a place where real wit can be brought into a story, play, television show, or film.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Types of Comedy: Part One – Physical Comedy
Types of Comedy: Part Three – Situational Comedy

1. physical comedy
2. verbal comedy
3. situational comedy

Certainly all of these get used in combination. Situational comedy in particular suggests a more theatrical presentation, whereby verbal and physical humour are used to enhance the comicality of the given circumstances. In fact verbal comedy will often allude to physical comedy without actually enacting physical events. So what do they offer individually?

Physical Comedy

This is the most basic and easily understood comedy. From babies to adults to people from all eras and cultures—farting, slipping on a banana peel, or making a rabbit appear and disappear from a hat is going to elicit laughter. We recognise the humanity of these acts, we recognise what’s at stake, and we all find it funny.

Physical comedy has mostly to do with our physicality: the vulnerability of our bodies and the strange things our bodies do such as fart, gurgle, vomit, excrete, gesticulate, and twitch. It also deals with our interactions with physical objects: such as trying to keep some object from falling over, avoiding being struck by an object, trying to get an object to perform correctly, keeping an object from getting away, attempting to remove an object, etc. Our interactions with animals and sometimes other people take on the humour of both bodies and objects.

Physical comedy can be over-used. One too many fart jokes can spoil the comic broth. Physical comedy can be abused. When sometimes humorous acts become an element of bullying, the humour will be sucked out for the empathetic members of the audience.

Empathy is one of the greatest building blocks for comedy. We cringe when someone in a cartoon hits their own thumb with a hammer. We laugh in relief when the results are a giant throbbing red thumb that heals in moments. Have a character hit another character’s thumb in an act of meanness, empathy dictates that we feel fear and anger (fight or flight) on behalf of the abused character.

Some of the most well-loved and well-remembered comedians are masters of physical comedy. Buster Keaton’s slapstick is still studied and used by comedians and filmmakers to this day. His most famous stunt was standing underneath one side of a two-storey building and having that side fall on top of him…and survive. One of the open windows, it turns out, was located precisely where Buster was standing. This same schtick was later used by another famous physical comedian, Jackie Chan.

Other physical comedians worth looking into are Frank Woodley, Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Mabel Normand, the first woman to throw a pie at Charlie Chaplin. Taking a course in clowning, acrobatics, even dance is not necessary, but helpful when pursuing this sort of humour.

Next week: Verbal Comedy

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

People who deal in facts, and who distort the facts in order to push for perhaps genuinely needed change, can do more harm than good. Fear is certainly a public motivator. Lies revealed, that were said for the “public good”, create disillusionment and apathy.

It is the job of experts to tell it to us straight. It is the job of storytellers to get people interacting with material facts intellectually and emotionally. Once we are in the realm of comedy people know we are in a play world, where reality is stretched and twisted and examined from a myriad of unusual and original perspectives.

Comedy is the fun way to engage people’s attention and potentially come up with real solutions. People don’t necessarily walk away frightened, depressed, or muddled by misrepresented facts. Facts may not enter into it at all, just “what-if”s.

Distopian fiction relies on “what if things continue in this manner” or “what if an aspect of this situation distorts itself out of proportion”. Disney’s humorous film Wall-E follows a distopian story arc. In the film’s world technology does everything for the humans. So much so that adult humans have become overweight babies who are transported, as if in an electronic pram, from one distraction to another. They have left Earth because by living in a wasteful indulgent culture, their pollution has destroyed the environment.

No one believes we will become the baby-people portrayed in Wall-E. However, we may already be suffering from some of the same issues the characters face. The fun and excitement we experience from this story may give us the strength to peek into the mirror at our own lives.

This sort of comic storytelling has been around for a long time: Gulliver’s Travels by Swift was published in 1726; Don Quixote by Cervantes, which was also the world’s first novel, was published in 1605; and Lysistrata by Aristophanes was originally performed in 411 BC. I’m sure examples exist even further back.

Exaggeration and buffoonery is how jesters are able to speak truth to the king. What the jesters present can be freely thought about or dismissed as foolishness. Jesters have traditionally been safe in the realm of political debate—and yet people of all political persuasions would hear the message.

Comedy uses a wide variety of exaggerations from the extraordinarily large to the exceptionally small, from overstatement to understatement.

Oversized props are an easy source of humour. The Goodies are famous for pulling out giant hammers, hats or enormous kittens. A clown car where the size of the car is miniscule, but the number of clowns emerging is out of proportion with the obvious space inside, has been a longstanding comic trope. Undersized props can be equally funny. Many comics will signal that they are a source of humour by wearing clothes that are too small. It’s as if they haven’t noticed they are no longer children and have outgrown their pants.

Most comic acting is emotionally over-wrought. Small troubles are magnified. The breaking of a toy is given the same emotional significance as a death in the family. The absurdity of the reaction is what helps give perspective on what truly deserves our rage, grief, or determination. Understatement can be a more subtle way of doing this. Marty the Martian in Bugs Bunny calmly states, “I’m going to blow up the Earth, it obstructs my view of Venus.”

Degrees of reaction are often paired with degrees of intensity in the actual situation. In Shaun of the Dead Shaun is at first underwhelmed by a highly dangerous situation involving deadly zombies. In The Young Ones Neil attempts suicide when no one cares about the lentil casserole he has made for tea.

Sometimes exaggeration is found in the complexity of a situation, and we are left wondering if the protagonist can possibly pull off saving the day. A classic version of this is a husband coming home and a wife having to hide not one, but several lovers in several locations. The fun is had as she tries numerous ways to cover up her deceptions.

Obvious exaggeration is a marvelous tool for bringing people to understand where real balance lays.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

My spaniel likes licking himself—lick, lick, lick—as if he were a popsicle. One day he stopped and melted. Left a poodle on the floor.

Dogs and cats lick themselves. People lick popsicles in a similar fashion. No surprises in the simile. But to take the simile literally and create an absurd image of a pet melting—the swift shift into the unexpected becomes cause for laughter.

The difficulty with surprise humour is that once the surprise is gone, so for the most part, is the joke.

A musician can play a song to the same audience over and over again. Some books bear re-reading. Once a joke has been told and its surprise revealed, it rarely bears retelling to a crowd familiar with your material. There are exceptions.

If a joke is part of a larger story people enjoy, then they may be happy to hear a punchline again. The joke is saying something about a character or situation. People laugh at the memory of their first surprise and laugh in recognition of the wit involved. Bill Cosby’s stories are classic examples.

If a joke speaks of something meaningful to its listeners, then hearing it again is a confirmation of their thoughts, concerns, and beliefs. George Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television is practically a mantra to those dedicated to preserving free speech.

If a joke is part of a running gag, then the audiences’ recognition of that humorous formula will also gain laughs. However, the trick here is that you aren’t really telling the same joke. You are finding surprising variations and new contexts within which to apply this joke.

These exceptions should in no way denigrate surprise humour. People love it as much as they love opening wrapped gifts. They experience set-up and punchline as anticipation, surprise, and enjoyment. It was a good surprise.

Since surprise is so crucial here, comedians need to keep in mind certain principles. First and foremost, your humour must be economical. Keep your audience engaged with efficient word use, so that they still care when you reach the punchline. Avoid telegraphing your jokes. If you give away too much too soon, your audience may arrive at the joke before you do. Regularly write new material. Cycle through a set of jokes within a year, then move on. As soon as you tell a joke on television, film, or YouTube, stop using it. This is known as burning your material. Too many people are likely to have seen it to keep the material fresh for your live performances.

The element of surprise in comedy is really what keeps this field so vibrant, creative, and original. This could be interpretted as meaning “more work”, but it’s well worth it. Surprise!

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

This comedy element works best within stories where the audience is emotionally engaged with events. This way you can build tension up to the deceptive climax. In the Pink Panther series of films Inspector Clouseau institutes a training program where his hired assistant Kato must attack him “wherever and whenever I least expect it.” This becomes a running gag. However, because Inspector Clouseau is regularly in real danger, the audience is never sure whether it’s the villain or Kato who has just gotten the better of him, and laugh in pleasure and relief when it is Kato.

Comic horror movies regularly use this trope from The Evil Dead to Shaun of the Dead. The clever twist used in Shaun of the Dead was the audience would be shown something that was genuinely dangerous within the world of the film, the protagonists would at first feel threatened, then come up with an explanation that made their fear seem ludicrous and laugh, but the threat was real and they had just managed to unwittingly escape it.

In more dramatic movies you might find a character who upon being told they have cancer burst into fits of wry mirth. The laugh can be ironic or just the quickest way to cope. We may not get any physical relief from a traumatic situation, but the laughter provides the emotional relief that generates resilience and personal heroism.

Fear-relief humour can work for the individual raconteur on stage, and literature has made it work now and then. I remember one moment in the Harry Potter books where this was used. I remember many times laughing at silly ghost stories we used to tell when I was a kid at a slumber party. Probably the most effective media for this element are theatrical productions and film, where it is much easier to generate the sort of emotional focus and climatic tension necessary for big laughs. Give it a try sometime and let me know how you go.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

Other unlikely combinations will also cause humour. Many comedy duos like to present a couple of characters who are distinct in ways that makes it improbable they would team up. The most common duo is the “Odd Couple”, where one character is clean and meticulous and the other is slobby and lackadaisical. This was made famous by Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple, but we also see it in Lano and Woodley, Lister and Rimmer in Red Dwarf, and a number of sitcoms dealing with married life.

These combinations are not automatically people who are “opposites”, but rather people who have characteristics that are likely to cause differences to arise. A ballet dancer is not the “opposite” of a police officer, neither is a hippy, a
conspiracy theorist, nor a grandmotherly community activist, but you can easily imagine humorous scenarios arising from a clash in world outlooks between these combinations. In fact by not being “opposites” the audience is likely to be intrigued and perhaps touched by those times where the gap between these people is bridged, and they find they can cooperate, even if for only a few moments.

Other unlikely combinations may be a threat and what is required to overcome it: zombies succumb to plastic forks. Or the password to a gangsters lair: teddy bears. Or what pleases a potential partner: a particularly dainty young woman who swoons at being given power tools, or a butch young man joyfully accepting the latest issue of Tea Cosies and You. The list goes on. Most of these examples are playing around with cultural expectations and stereotypes. This is why they seem unlikely. More and more women are getting into DIY home renovation, so the humour in a woman happily receiving an electric drill is almost gone.  However, give that same woman a jack hammer and you will probably still get a laugh.

As a late Friday exercise (sorry, I’m moving house ) write:

1. an unlikely duo
2. facing an unlikely threat
3. with an unlikely weapon.

For example: a barmaid and a pixie are forced to rid their land of a dragon and all they have is a brightly coloured ostrich feather.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

Transformations are when something or someone changes into something comically distinct. Usually comic transformations are fast, like a prince turning into a frog, but they can also be slow.

The film on which I completed the principle photography last year makes use of both slow and fast transformations. One character, the son of a bogan father, has caught an STD turning him into a fairy. Throughout the movie we watch as he suffers the embarrassment of gaining one fairy-like characteristic after another, such as poofy wings on his back. His transformation is a running gag. Also in this film are a horde of minion ninjas. When the ninjas attack, they are ultimately defeated by our bogan fairy, who with a wave of a sausage stick (his erstaz wand), turns ninjas instantly into harmless mascot bunnies.

The humour in transformations may come from the surprise factor. It may also come from that stage in our childhood development when we learned about the continuity of beingness. A can of beans will continue to be a can of beans, even if we turn away then quickly turn back. Therefore it’s funny to pretend that maybe it turns into a confused warthog. We now know reality doesn’t work that way, so it’s funny to intentionally get it wrong (perhaps a form of
rule breaking humour). This is the same reason why some people find the misplacement of apostrophe’s hilarious.

Inversions have a similar comic impact as transformations, but the change must be swift in order to be funny. Someone at the top of a tall ladder who unexpectedly, but safely, falls to the bottom is funny. Someone at the top of the ladder who climbs down in a minute or two is not.

Usually, someone in a high position suddenly moving to a low position is the funniest inversion. A king instantly
becoming a street sweeper we find funny because it speaks to our frustration and desire to see those above us fall below us. However, someone being given a balloon and improbably being jerked up, such that they are flailing around in a panic—that’s funny. It’s also funny when a bunch of tough guys are all fighting over a prize, thereby making it possible for a little bespectacled geek to go from zero to hero and carry off a trophy twice his size. Mind you, the tough guys have been brought low, but it has been made funny by the exaggerated change in circumstances for the geek.

Inversions can be horizontal as well as vertical, or any directions you like. It’s a matter of going from one extreme to another: old to young, short to tall, weak to strong, etc.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy Introduction

Ignorance and enlightenment are a matter of who knows what when. Usually the audience is in on the joke. Let’s say Aaron has been dating a big glam-rock star’s daughter. The relationship is quite a sweet one. When Aaron thinks he’s hanging out with a group of roadies and tries to impress by bragging about this relationship, he doesn’t realise that one of them is his girlfriend’s father without the makeup and glam gear. As the audience we watch on in horror and amusement as Aaron shoves his foot unwittingly further and further down his throat. The humour might be compounded by a friend who is frantically waving at Aaron to stop, since he’s understands the situation.

The next step in this scenario might be the girlfriend turns up chirping, “Oh Aaron, you’ve been introduced to Daddy!”  Aaron has now been enlightened as to his predicament and he needs to figure out how much he has given away and begin the painfully humorous effort of trying to dig himself out. When the father becomes enlightened to parts of the situation, as well as the girlfriend, these will also provide moments of uncomfortable humour involving poor silly Aaron.

Some Like It Hot ends with the character of Osgood, who has been determinedly offering marriage to Daphne, finally becoming enlightened that she is a man. He then utters the film’s memorable last line, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” This
enlightens the audience that perhaps Osgood’s sexuality is a bit blurred or that he’s desperate, and gets a laugh. Here the element of ignorance and enlightenment overlaps with the element of surprise and may in fact be a distinct subset.

Peace and kindness,

Katherine

Elements of Comedy: Introduction