Writing good comedy

This isn't just for writings with that specific genre, I'm also talking about some small comic relief scenes in any genre of writing.

I'd thought I'd share my tastes in humor first. I like the more strange humor, like how something simple as walking, is made a lot more goofy looking. As a visual artist, I enjoy some visual humor, especially when the humor is in the background. When it comes to parody and recreating scenes, I never want to play them straight. I don't just insert characters in roles and put them in the exact same poses, and that's it. When a group leaps out of a building I make one of them look like a dancing ballerina. Or when somebody is trying to make a serious speech but even he starts to notices something wrong.

Remember this scene in Family Guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5UnXYQ5vLA The only funny thing they did was replace the wonder twins with "and Meg." They should've made a camera hit them in the face when they did a close up. They should've had Peter literally be punched by a meteor, and when they were flying in that group shot with Superman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman in space, one of them should be choking.

I don't want to go too far in this because that would be explaining the joke, and nobody wants to explain. Heck, verbal explaining should be banned from every medium, if we the audience are that smart enough. (but that's a topic for another thread)

But comedy is too easy to be bad. I think the worse kind of humor, are the ones that make you sorry for the character getting hurt rather than laugh at them. I know one of the elements of comedy is pain, but when the pain is too realistic and horrifying, it's no longer funny. If we are going by different logic on pain=comedy, the Exorcist is the funniest movie ever.

But these are my thoughts slash ramblings. You see I say rambling because-

The problem with writing good comedy is that it's fucking HARD. Sure, you can learn timing, delivery, and "avoid Narm because it's NOT supposed to be funny," but humor is really subjective.

There seems to be an innate ability to comedy—my theater prof's been trying to teach comedy to his students for years, and he's not making much progress on it. I can write things and deliver scenes/lines in a way that makes people laugh, but I can't explain just HOW I manage to pull it off. Sure, it's timing and delivery and the writing has to support it, but humor is more than the sum of those three things.

It's a lot like writing: You can learn the techniques and how to avoid the pitfalls of bad writing, and then you'll have good writing, but GREAT writing like the masters? It's something that you can't seem to teach or learn, at least not completely.

edited 9th Jun '15 7:26:26 PM by Sharysa

Humor is heavily based on incongruity between expectations and reality, and thrives on context and reference.

In one of your examples, of a superhero suffocating in space, it's relying on (and referencing) people knowing the Batman Breathes In Space phenomenon. It's pushing on the unexpected incongruity of someone not following genre conventions and suffocating regardless of them.

However, someone who doesn't get the reference won't find it funny; someone who's seen joke before, or can tell it's coming might not be as amused as when it's a complete novelty.

This is why humor can be hard to pull off- you have to guess what people know, and what will trigger their sense of humor. You can't make a joke that they won't get, or one they've heard to much, or one they flatly won't find funny.

It's hard.

Things like that are precisely why I don't like Family Guy anymore. The jokes have become "something famous, but with Family Guy characters". Or it's an Overly Long Gag.

Having said that, comedy is hard. Especially in written form. I would like to believe that I do it well. I like whacky and nonsensical humor, but I also like humor that makes sense. My favorites are parodies and puns. For example, I really like Terry Pratchett.

In my own stories, I like to include a lot of puns and humorous subversions of tropes. While there is a lot of humor going on, I try to make my world still make sense for the most part.

edited 11th Jun '15 7:12:56 AM by washington213

I go by "if it makes you giggle it'll probably do the same for your audience."

Comedy can probably get by a lot on timing. Even if the thing itself isn't clever, or sensible, the manner of delivery can cue some sort of laughter.

But one other theory I've read about comedy is that it basically reinforces the target audiences' worldview. A person slipping on a banana peel, for example, could undercut pretense if that person were well-dressed and snobbish. So, we laugh. Or it could be a lowborn bumpkin who slips on a banana peel, and the comedy of that harm appeals more to the classist in us. Or it could just be the slapstick, in which case I'm guessing that it appeals to the humor that it's pain happening to somebody beyond empathy and not to us in the audience so cozy and comfortable.

Mayherestinpeace. I remember this one footnote that got me laughing so hard that I couldn't inhale for about a terrifying 75 seconds.

I think another element of comedy is that something about it must be fresh. Reference jokes can be incongruous and therefore funny, but overuse them and it begins to come off that it's supposed to be funny because it exists...which, you know, existence itself isn't funny. In the above example, for me, it was the timing. Pratchett could have stopped at "duplicated" and gotten a chuckle, but oh by gods they never reversed the spell and all the Al-Ybi had to just continue to deal with it for the rest of that civilization's historical life?? Help I can't breathe.

Humor is, as so many other things, at least partially about power. Twain wrote a great deal about humor in some of his works, and one of his key themes was always that humor deflates the haughty, gives power to the powerless, or both. A bear attacking a housecat is horrific. A bear fleeing from a housecat is funny. Mockery spoken between equals gets only some to laugh; mockery spoken to power can get everyone to laugh.

Twain's rant about "persons attempting to find plot will be shot" in one of his books is amusing because even though we've remitted unto him a measure of power by reading his book, we know he can't stop us from finding plots and morals and the like. He knew we'd find it funny for just that reason. That's why he wrote it.