No Idea What I'm Doing - Pt 2

Why does comedy exist?

This ought to have been the central question of my philosophy thesis in college, but instead it was “Why do so many guys hang out at my girlfriend’s apartment?”

In an attempt to continue to figure out what I know about joke writing in this second part of my completely self-serving inquiry, I’m going talk about where I think comedy comes from, and why things are funny. We’ll see if it gets me anywhere actually.

Firstly, I don’t really think this is a question a lot of comedians think about, let alone non-comedians. Things either are or are not funny. Comedy isn’t like drama. You can see a bad dramatic movie and afterward someone can go “Well you just didn’t get it,” and you can even agree “Yeah I didn’t like it, and I didn’t get it, but I can understand why other people get it and like it.” Nobody says this about dead baby jokes. You either like dead baby jokes, or you have a soul, there is no in-between.

So why does comedy exist? Why do people laugh at anything?

I’ve heard tell in apocryphal texts of an evolutionary theory of humor that comes from the bodies involuntary response of releasing tension after what you thought was going to be a terrifying thing actually turned out to be fine. You thought that something was going to be bad, and were prepared for it to go bad, but then it went good and the laugh you had was the tension that you felt in your body ready for something to go wrong delightfully dissipating into a noise letting everyone else know it was alright.

I like this explanation because it elegantly ties together a few things we know about comedy and humans. It explains why laughter is contagious; because laughter is a signal by social humans that everything is okay and the coast is clear. It also explains why jokes always take place around some kind of tension: because something has to almost go wrong in order to produce the tension that elicits laughter.

I want to be careful, because this doesn’t mean that all comedy has to be around controversial or tense subjects, but it does explain why there is some kind of tension in every joke. Things that have no emotional or logical tension don’t make for very good comedy subjects. A really unfunny story never involves everything working out the way its supposed to.

This sense of relief is also why comedy = tragedy + time. If we’re still here, then everything worked out, so all the awful stuff that happened to make the tragedy must’ve worked out.

Hopefully this means that Trump’s presidency will eventually be funny.

Incidentally, I think I just cracked the code to time travel: comedy - tragedy = time. Thanks algebra!

So finding subjects that have some kind of tension, or doing the work to find the tension and using it, is key to a good joke. The setup is the part of the joke that pulls the tension into. There can’t be a punchline without a setup, and there can’t be a good laugh without a release of the tension introduced without that setup.

The problem for comedy comes in when the setup takes someone past their comfort zone immediately.

Bill Burr talks about a joke he saw written on a chalkboard outside a bar in Boston. It read “We like our beer like we like our violence, domestic.” I know why he digs it, “ That’s a perfect joke!” he says. “There isn’t an ounce of fat on it!”

He’s write, if you had no particular feelings about the subject matter then it is the perfect joke in many ways. You can’t take a single word away and still have it work, and you can’t add anything to it that would make it better. Adding anything would detract from the joke. It’s elegant. It has only what it needs and nothing more.

His point in bringing it up is that some people are really offended by it. I guess that’s the world we live in today. But the reason why is obvious: the tension introduced from the subject is immediately too uncomfortable for some people. For some people, the ride got off to too rough of a start.

That’s fine, not every roller coaster is for every person.

The key, I think, is to write a setup that is palatable enough to get people on the ride, and then end up toward more tension at the end of it. So the question I ask myself is “What word choice can I use to try and trick the audience into getting onto a ride that they didn’t think was this tense?”

The problem with Bill Burr’s favorite joke is that there isn’t a lot of other words we could’ve used to continue the same amount of tension in the joke. Some other options:

• We like our beer like we like our partnerships, domestic.
• We like our beer like we like our cars, domestic.
• We like our beer like we like our appliances, domestic.
• We like our beer like we like our abuse, domestic.
• We like our beer like we like our cats, domestic.
• We like our beer like we like our workers, domestic.

There are some obviously bad choices here. We can’t use “abuse” because it’s a more tense word than “violence” (maybe something to remind people who think “violence” is too much for this joke - it could actually be worse). Although the people who would object to the use of the word “violence” in this joke might like “partnerships,” or “cars/automobiles,” these terms don’t really have a lot of oomph to them. “Workers” is also a potential option, but it also isn’t funny.

The reason “violence” makes this a joke and no these other words is because it doesn’t go too far, such as with “abuse,” which paints the entire situation as negative due to the associations the word “abuse” brings with it, and yet still goes far enough to have tension to be resolved. None of these other terms have tension to juxtapose.

Juxtaposition will have to be the subject of tomorrow’s blog, but suffice it to say that a casual passer-by who looked at a sign and saw “We like our beer like we like our partnerships, domestic,” would probably think “What the fuck? Is this supposed to be funny or something?”

There’s no joke there. Without tension and a sense of pretense to juxtapose against, there is no relief from the tension. It’s obvious that someone can’t possibly mean that domestic violence is something they like, because no sane person would like that. So the tension must be relieved from an understanding that “Normal people can’t take this seriously.” Again, more on this juxtaposition tomorrow.