What... is humor? (Let's make a comedy)

Comedy. Harder than drama. Much harder than drama. Much much harder than drama. In trying to write a comical strip, I was thinking, is this funny? How would I know? Sometimes things are only funny to the people who made them.

What is funny? Why do we laugh? What and why... is comedy? ... So let's make a comedy.

It would be nice if we could get some psychology in here, so we can understand the basis of humor.

edited 22nd May '12 9:55:47 PM by AmazingLagann

No offense, but I absolutely disagree with the basic premises of this thread.

What, that comedy is harder than drama? Drama is easy, comedy is hard. Trying to make people laugh is much harder than trying to make people cry. Drama can go by a formula, but you can't map a sense of humor.

edited 22nd May '12 9:05:32 PM by AmazingLagann

xfd wow this thread is so full of pretentiousness and wrongness. Drama is easy? Do you even know what drama is?

Well, I disagree with that too - effective drama, in my experience, is a lot harder then effective comedy. I know that I laugh at failed drama far more often then I cry at failed comedy.

But what I actually was referring to was the idea that we can come up with some single definition for 'humor'. Humor is subjective. Some things are funny to certain people, others to others. I personally feel that everyone who does Toilet Humor should be shot at dawn; other people think it's hilarious. Trying to answer the question "What... is humor?" with anything besides "It depends" is, in my view, an inherently flawed exercise.

There's no need to be rude.

edited 22nd May '12 9:17:14 PM by nrjxll

Nrjxll is right, you don't have to be an asshole about this. People like you shouldn't be on this site. If you criticize, to it constructively.

I know what drama is. Maybe you don't. By putting together a few drama tropes, you can make a workable dramatic scene. But comedy cannot be formulaic. That's bad comedy. It's easy for someone to get me to sympathize with a character, but making someone laugh takes a lot of thought and effort. Improving a comedy is much, much harder than improving a drama. I know this from experience.

There are things that everyone can identify with (unless they are complete monsters) that are sad. Death, pain, and other things. But very little (maybe none at all) circumstances are inherently funny. Thus, drama is easy.

Well, what makes you laugh. Why?

edited 22nd May '12 9:51:44 PM by AmazingLagann

I'm not being rude. I'm being truthful. If you truly think that "drama is easy" then you have no idea what drama is. Please go learn what it is. That is my constructive criticism.

edited 22nd May '12 10:02:07 PM by KaiserMazoku

"Drama is easy"

You made a claim, so proof should follow. Also even though drama may be formulaic on the surface, it's not the tropes you use it's how you use it. Drama I think can be either deep or shallow on many levels.

The truth is not everyone understands all kinds of pains and won't really be able to unless they felt it themselves. Sure you can write about betrayal or a guy being misunderstood. But without truly understanding it, the symptoms you add afterward would just be out of place. Thus the drama is written poorly.

Understanding an emotion means knowing it completely inside out. Every aspect of it. Tropes alone won't get you that. It's true humor is more abstract but drama takes more depth. It's true this is major derailment but be careful next time you make a claim. That is unless you already have proof drama is easy.

edited 22nd May '12 10:21:10 PM by PsychoFreaX

I'm with Louie CK: Farts are funny. The pinnacle of comedy, right there.

I'm personally of the school that good comedy is more difficult to write or pull off than drama, but I will admit (speaking as an actor and a writer) that this applies more to plays, movies, television and especially stand-up than it does to prose. This is mostly because, in that sort of visual medium, not only must the basic script be funny, but the interpretation. A great line is just a line without a great delivery; the delivery turns it into something more. Writing fiction is infinitely more straightforward: Still difficult without the proper sense of timing and general practice, but ultimately something that the reader experiences directly rather than through a proxy, the merits or failings being purely textual rather than interpretative.

Toilet humor aside. I guess the easiest form of comedy to write would be parodies. Pick a trope and turn it to focus on a side that makes it more somewhat... silly?

Not as easy as toilet humor. But it has taste.

edited 23rd May '12 12:10:35 AM by PsychoFreaX

The way I see it, comedy and drama are two sides of the same coin- both equally difficult to do well. When you have something as complicated as fiction writing it's impossible to measure which idea is more challenging to pull off.

To answer the OP's question, comedy is about pacing and rhythm.

OP: Are you seriously asking how the human brain interprets humor on a psychological level? Don't look at it that way. You're best off just reading funny things, trying to imitate them, and trying to imitate them, and trying to imitate them. A lot. Practice is what makes a good writer, of any kind.

Drama is easy to write. Basically all drama boils down to any or all of the following:

• Something bad happened to somebody in their past.
• One or more people disagree on something.
• Something needs to happen in a limited amount of time.

Provided you have a good "something," and your characters react in the right way, you'll get good drama.

Comedy is not easy because different people find different things humorous. There's different ways to invoke the "this is funny" response. For example, there's absurdist humor, where the situation comes from out of left-field. The humor comes from the situation.

• IE, imagine Batman at a party dancing the Cha-Cha Slide. It makes no sense whatsoever because it's the goddamn Batman, and that's why it's funny.

There's bait-and-switch humor, where something happens that's the total opposite of what's normally expected, and sort of forces a laugh in a "that's kind of clever" sort of way.

• IE There's a scene in Shuffle where Guy A and Girl A are about to enter a classroom, and Guy A stops her from opening the door, gives her this look, and starts to open the door. I'd seen enough Harem Anime to know that Girl B was about jump out at Guy A and he was stopping her from glomping Girl A by mistake. However, it actually happened that Guy B jumped out, trying to glomp Girl A. It threw me for such a loop that laughter was practically the only response I had.

So in addition to pacing and rhythm as Aka-letters said, there's a bit of expectation involved as well.

edited 23rd May '12 2:24:34 PM by SalFishFin

Humor is the tone of a work, not a genre. That is why comedy is so hard to get right.

BAD drama may be easy to write (just like bad anything). Good drama is a little more complex than that, and certainly not as easy or simplistic as you're making it.

Thank you for that - it's what I was trying to get across by using the term 'effective' drama earlier. Any fool can write something he thinks is dramatic, but it's a lot harder to actually succeed.

I've written both comedy and drama and personally, the comedy is WAY harder.

I believe comedy is one of those things that's hard only when you try to be funny. It's not hard to make your friends laugh when you're just telling a story. Why is it so different with writing? That's all you're doing is trying to tell a story and amusing your friends (or the audience). But if your approach to writing comedy is "What's the next funny thing that can happen?", then you're going to fail. Focus on the story, and don't hold yourself back if you want to take the story to some wild places.

I always heard the secret to good comedy is timing, but there are others. Exaggeration and subversion are also very important. But like all things, the true secret to success is practice practice practice. Watch a lot of comedy, and then write a lot of comedy. Also, try to get feedback from people you trust.

That's very true. There's a quote out there along the lines of "the worst thing an actor can do is try to be funny". It's the same for writers. You have to introduce your characters into situations that are funny for us, but not for them. We as humans like to point and laugh at others' misfortune. More often than not, when the subject realizes the situation and tries to get in on the joke, it stops being funny.

And hell, that's ignoring the fact that humor is wildly subjective and no one joke is going to be funny for 100% of your audience. But if you've established your characters and the audience knows what to expect from them, your success rate will be higher. Vegeta wearing a pink shirt is hilarious. Goku wearing an infinitely more bizarre outfit isn't. It's all because of what their characters are like and how familiar the audience has become with the characters over the course of the show.

edited 23rd May '12 5:59:29 PM by KaiserMazoku

The timing of humor is COMPLETELY different when writing, as opposed to real life. I have made people fall to the floor with laughter, with very well timed jokes. Jokes that just would not be NEARLY as hilarious in a book, and hell, not even a show!

edited 23rd May '12 7:09:43 PM by MrAHR

True, that.

That's why I'm unable to find works that are exclusively comedy or exclusively drama interesting. It feels freaking unnatural and manufactured. Fiction, just like real life, should have both ups and downs. To get positive reaction from your audience, you have to be sincere about what you write.

Comedy is harder at least in one aspect: people have a lot less patiente for the build up.

They can wait for the drama, to create the situation, the characters, the scenario. That doesn't happen in comedy, you need to be funny as soon as possible and yet not look as if you were trying too hard.

That seems like it's coming from the 'humor is objective' standpoint again - there's people out there for whom an overly-long build-up is funny in its own right.

Judging by my low standards and inability to understand a lot of jokes, I would say if I find it funny, it's not humor.