The equating of jokes and comedy here is an affront for anyone who has explored different avenues of comedy in any way. The analysis is fine and even interesting for (as others have pointed out) one specific type of joke but just flippantly calling that all of comedy is very jarring as it is obviously wrong.
I just completed a clown workshop this weekend where I was in tears laughing from an exercise of simply playing peekaboo, my improvised musical team has gotten laughs and applause from our piano man simply starting to play music and from us rhyming two words, I've seen TJ & Dave erupt a room from being as realistic and truthful as possible in their improv, one of my Edinburgh Fringe highlights was a performer crashing a live podcast recording multiple times and falling over, spilling many pints in the process.
That is all just to say that comedy is much more than just jokes, and especially much more than jokes that fit this theory. To be clear though, I am not against attempting such formalisms and theories (I have many myself and do think this kind of thinking is great for generating ideas), I've just yet to see a good comprehensive one.
He also said he was tired of comedy as he knew all of the jokes. Later he sort of contradicted himself by saying that Waiting For Godot is a very funny play and that he felt he had not yet understood it all.
So that's kind of an interesting counterpoint...he does essentially conflate comedy and jokes.
I believe he actually said that all humour is passed on, i.e. that all the comic acts that have come along after Laurel and Hardy were in essence re-enacting scenes that they had performed, in another form, prior.
Of course, Laurel and Hardy were brilliant, but it would actually be naive to think that the chain began there. Performed comedy is as old as civilisation itself, and always fluctuates in sophistication/depth relative to the target audience.
Laurel and Hardy represent a talented comedic duo, heavy on physical humour (though not without wit) captured on film so that the physicality of their performance was not up for debate or a supposition, and was available to be absorbed and drawn upon by later comedic performers, and I think this physicality is why Adrian calls back to them. For him, they offer a textbook approach to a broad category of humour.
As for the finitude of humour, I think it would be rather more bizarre if the contrary was true and humour was infinite. Then everything could be funny. Maybe there are a lot of permutations for humour -- if you think about it, the audience (and by extension the time they live in) somewhat dictate what is and isn't funny, and there are considerations as well for cultural context (i.e. JP and CN are going to have a lot of material that will seem nonsensical to a Western audience and vice versa) some humour is obviously universal.
But even to include all topical, regional humour, the number of phrases and physical movements of bodies that can trigger genuine amusement is very likely to be a finite subset of the possible permutations, especially given that all permutations themselves will be finite in total number (there are not an infinite number of words or possible physical occurrences...)
Perhaps indeed there is even a small number of types of humour-incitement, of which all topical, regional jokes are simply manifestations. To group humour-incitement types in this way, Adrian's assertion seems even more acceptable.
He doesn't say Laurel and Hardy invented humour or anything that we could immediately refute. I think he considers their work to be the textbook. Everything you should see before coming up with your own material can be found in their catalogue.
Like all art, grasp the fundaments and figure out which rules you want to subvert to get your message across, for the sake of doing so rather than empty rebellion or feeding reviewers from a marketing perspective.
Sometimes there's no reason to break a rule, and sometimes there's every reason.
As for his fatigue, whether the man has had exposure to humour from other cultures is not clear, but certainly in the context of his own culture I would be inclined to agree. The vast majority of comedy in the West is very obviously recycled material with different packaging. That's not to say that sometimes the later recyclings aren't better than the "originals" —- a lot of it is in the delivery, and if you watch them all without bias (nostalgia) you can probably pick out some cases where a comedy from 2007 is funnier than something conceptually similar from 1987.
A lot of people grew up with comedy shows that were the best of their time and thus become the best for those people, and they watch stuff 20 years later after having rewatched their favourites a dozen times as well and it all seems less novel. Perhaps the same effect occurs for the performers as well as the audience.
Adrian also lost his partner in comedy, the infamous Rik Mayall, and this perhaps soured him on comedy without that second half to bounce off of. They used to tour live and they would often break character and break the fourth wall —- while their long collaboration and friendship would lend a good deal of weight to it, as well as topical spice depending on the region, I think they were keen to do it anyway to keep their material a little fresher and keep things interesting for themselves while doing it. Touring the same act up and down the country would surely be enough to convince anyone it's all been done before. Losing that certainly confines one's repertoire to only the rehearsed material.
I think he's married to Jennifer Saunders (of Absolutely Fabulous and French and Saunders fame) but I don't think they ever collaborated much.
This is worth googling for anybody who’s not urgently meant to be doing something for the next ten minutes. Also on Conan, for anyone looking for an amazing example of humour without a punchline is “conan nathan fielder susan”
Others say things funny.”
Something like that.
I describe this "ground-floor basis" not as "comedy is search" but "comedy is learning." One of the first things babies laugh at is object permanence. But you quickly get into forms of comedy that are much more than the formula discussed into the article. Consider sarcasm. Consider crass humor derived from blatant invocation of socially inappropriate subjects. Consider "inside jokes" which are often purely social, having lost all connection to the "relating two concepts."
With search, I understand it as a process of learning, where diff search strategies create different learnings. Maybe laughter is a strategy of search, or what the algorithm feels like from the inside attention head...?
And search feels like moving around a tree or maybe graph (moving thru graph from known origin to unknown extremities, this is maybe tree-like in any meaningful local sense). Anyhow, searches being depth-first vs breadth-first with attention feels related.
Thinking through your comment has me reflecting on the distinction between depth-first vs breadth-first comedy, and if that even makes sense :)
My wife and I have a 15 month old and one of our favourite games is for one of us to sit with him on the stairs looking through the bannisters at the other one dancing and singing. Sometimes we are all in absolute hysterics. Humour is very much about a collective will to engage in the shared enjoyment, and I reckon most parents would agree with me.
But yes, OP's article does not really cover satire, parody, toilet humour, slapstick, deadpan, cringe humour etc...
I have tried to read it 3 times and ended up laughing so hard my stomach hurt until I had to stop reading.
I can't finish it, it's too funny.
100% worth an attempt to read at least 3 times so far.
<rant>Search is a nice concept, it defines everything clearly - search space, goal space, action space. Compare it with fuzzy concepts like understanding, intelligence and consciousness. We can never define them, precisely because they gloss over their input-output domains and try to present a distributed process as centralized in the brain.
Search has a bunch of properties - it is compositional, hierarchical, recurrent (iterative in time) and recursive. This pattern holds across many fields, I think it is based on the fundamental properties of space-time which are also compositional, hierarchical and recurrent (object state at time t+1 depends on its state at time t)
Search can be personal, inter-personal, physical or information based. It can explain away much of the mystery of the three fuzzy concepts I mentioned. I describe cognition as two search loops - search externally by applying known behavior to collect experience, and search internally to compress experience and update behavior.</>
I think this hypothesis goes a long way to explaining why the math of transformers (doing mathematical operations on language) create something that rhymes so much with intelligent thought. Though I should clarify that LLMs do not share the same processes or verbs of our intelligence, only the snapshot moment-in-time of a mind-like object ;)
I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally, like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in this space without having a central understander. Encoding your own experiences creates a first person perspective from 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain in philosophy.
The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should always look for the larger context where we develop, not just the brain.
Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed processing, no homunculus.
I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized understanding or truth.
You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) )
It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them".
> Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
We're good at predicting states of minds of others (helpful when trying to exploit limited resources, and very helpful for either predator or prey), and we can cheaply gather a lot of data on ourselves, so why should the capability for inferring states of mind not, as a side effect, also provide us with our own inferred state of mind: our own "I"?
- Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever.
- Epiphany humor -- the joke relies on some new thought, connection, or idea, and the "joke" is the leap your mind needs to make in order to comprehend the novel idea. eg. "Otis Elevators: They'll never let you down!" In this case, you must take the familiar phrase "let you down [emotionally]" and realize the second meaning "elevators move up and down [physically]."
- Story-based humor, which probably needs a better name, but is mostly what stand-up comedy is. Other kinds of humor can be mixed in here, but often the "joke" relies on something of a straw man -- setting up a character in the story where the audience can readily recognize that at least one character being related is a fool, and worthy to be laughed at. Often this is perspective-based, and is based around relating to the characters in the stand-up comedian's story. For instance, take Bill Burr's joke about women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1GY-yr-BM -- the "joke" here is mostly whether or not you agree with Bill's characterization of the situation. The joke is not universally funny, but relies on the audience's perspective. If you've never seen the world from the same perspective as Bill, the joke may not hit the mark, or might even seem rude.
- Tone-of-voice humor. This is a joke where there's no real joke, but the tone of voice is really doing 90% of the work. It's just retelling a relatively benign event, except the tone of voice exaggerates the emotions attached to the words. I don't have an example ready for this one because I really dislike this "style" of humor, but imagine some of the less creative or talented stand-up artists.
- SNL humor. "What if an unusual or annoying thing happened?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE93xON8jk
- Social awkwardness humor / Dramatic irony. See all / most of Arrested Development.
I agree there are examples that incongruity doesn't cover, e.g. slapstick I personally believe is something a bit different, but generally I do think it's a pretty compelling explanation for a lot of modern comedy.
Like the other day my friend read "shrimp cargot" off a menu. I said "They taught a shrimp how to drive??" The other friend present thought it was the funniest thing ever while the first friend was in pain from it, which just made it funnier. We had the same 50% split relaying it to two more people later.
(It also relies a bit on knowing the "a shrimp fried this rice?" joke to be funniest but it's not required)
It starts as an infant when you laugh by having your surface nerves rapidly engaged through tickling. Even peakaboo is a fear game due to the child’s lack of object permanence.
When you examine all funny things through the lens of fear, it becomes an interesting logic exercise to draw a connection between the humor you see and how it may or may not be connected to fear.
Consider all of your examples through that lens.
I’ve been practicing / performing improv comedy for about 5 years now. Keith Johnson style, not UCB style.
Newbies always try to be clever, but being clever is a total trap. The moments that always get the biggest laughs are when you acknowledge something that was already in the room. The audience had a thought - or a proto thought - “where did the umbrella go?” “I thought his name was Fred?” “But why is the duck talking?”. When you acknowledge it on stage, with lightness and connection, you get mad laughter.
I think you’re right about the fear thing. I think doing this acknowledges some deep fear of being alone, or stupid, or something. As a performer, when we make you whole, and do it in a way that feels easy and comfortable, I think, just for a moment, it makes that fear go away. And that’s what the audience is responding to when they laugh. There’s an old line from clowning: “When the performer breathes, the audience breathes.” I think it’s deeper than that. When the performer demonstrates being deeply ok with themselves, the audience believes it might be possible for them too.
The way I’ve explained it is “unserious surprise” which also fits with this.
Super interesting!
I thought about it for jokes, as the reaction is quick (just system 1 and very maybe for more complex jokes it’s system 2 understanding the joke and then system 1 laughing… but then it might not spontenous enough to lough out loud), didn’t though about that for “all funny things”.
Do you have some sources detailng this more?
In other words; comical relief.
To respond to just one part:
> Bullying, where the joke is not particularly funny, but instead relies on attacking someone's status in front of a crowd. The crowd laughs in recognition of the successful attack, not because the joke is clever
I think you might have it inverted. The crowd doesn't laugh bc it's a successful attack. It's a successful attack bc they laugh.
The audience is largely voting with their choice of where they deploy their "social" laugh. Laughter used to be an involuntary hardwired animal sound (like a "moo"), that signaled a space of learning and safety, to explore and play. It attracted other primates to join on that merit. but along the way it became rewired into the software level of social context. Humans started deploying laughter to shape their social context: to flatter, to flirt, to charm, and yes, to hurt. This is why we laugh more and differently around other humans. (Some of this was discovered via dissecting muscles around the eyes, that activate most readily in more "true" involuntary Duchenne laughter, but not the contrived social laughter.)
So the laughing audience is complicit in the bullying. They are creating the weapon, and the attack. If it's actually funny, it just takes less work to get the audience on your side. That's the performance of bullying -- whether you can carry either a willing or unwilling audience along for the weaponising of the laughter.
Also, if there are any universal theory then how come my grandad just doesn't understand why comedy i like is funny and vice-versa? It's not that i don't get "his comedy". It's just I find it hard to believe anyone would ever really laugh at it like mine. Then there's jokes from acient times that you wouldn't even think of as jokes now, but we know people laughted. If there is a universal theory of comedy i suspect it would be flexible to the point of being usless as it'd covers almost all human activity.
Glad you mentioned this. Watched stand up specials in groups where the set up for a story joke used mostly tone-of-voice and my friends laughed and I wondered why they found it funny. Maybe the anticipation of a joke combined with the tone-of-voice make people laugh? I struggle to get it.
An exception that comes to mind is SNL's REALLY segment. Pohler and Meyers beat the joke so deep into the dirt it comes back around as funny
> I don't stop eating when I'm full. The meal isn't over when I'm full. It's over when I hate myself. (Louis C.K.)
I think the best jokes of the greatest comedians that ever lived were jokes that don't even work when you write them down, its all in the greater context, delivery and timing. One of my favorite types of jokes are references to earlier parts of a show, it feels like more work for the setup intensifies the punch line.
- In this case, Louis' delivery is part of what makes it clear that this is a joke. I guess I might say it's an intermixture of tonal and story-telling delivery. It would be possibly to tell the same story, but it would only be depressing and not funny. Part of the delivery is how the humor is conveyed. ie, "I don't really hate myself, I'm being hyperbolic for the sake of humor."
- Separately, I think his joke would be much less relatable if he didn't make himself the target of the joke. He's volunteering himself as the target of the humor, and so not punching down at anyone. It's much harder to be offended when the speaker volunteers the topic and the target.
(https://mymorningmeditations.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/...)
The physiological manifestation of the humor response is also explained by evolutionary fitness when you consider it as countering the physiological reaction to the perception of stressful ambiguity.
Also I don't think the comics final answer is satisfactory, because you could definitely respond to absurdity, by calling out why something is absurd, you don't have to laugh at it.
So why do we have a sense of humor in the first place?
There's a Seinfeld episode where George gets fired -- and then decides to go back to work anyway, believing that he's teaching them a lesson. I've seen it many times, so I know exactly what's coming, but my brain still can't seem to prepare itself for the deep, character-consistent idiocy of it. I will never not laugh while watching this. The question is: Why?
Due to the title I presume that this is another pro-"AI" article that devalues human ingenuity. Well, enjoy the non-funny jokes. I'll stick to pre-2022 material.
I come from a long line of police marksmen. Apart from my grandfather, who was a bank robber. But he died recently..... surrounded by his family.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-s...
A couple follow that pattern exactly, but some also bank on taking words literally for comic effect.
> I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it. (Mark Simmons)
I agree that most of the jokes were weak, but they basically have to use one-liners in order to give many quick examples, and nearly all one-liners I meet are bad. That said, I genuinely enjoyed the "step ladder" one.
I'll provide a light bulb joke as an example...
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's not funny.
> And here are a few jokes that were created using this method: (...)
> "I'm awful at jogging, I'm running slower than windows 95" (...)
> "You're such a great guy! - I'm not a great guy. Abraham Lincoln was a great guy. I'm a barely adequate guy." (...)
These are two out of 6 examples there - all are extremely plain and boring, except maybe for the last (which is just barely funny).
People with a "nerdy" mindset want to find the structure behind everything. That's not a bad thing, but it's so annoying to people who actually do comedy...or music...or art.
Not everything in life can be reduced and programmed. But they'll keep on trying.
Failure at comprehension does not deaden, any more than only seeing a minute fraction of the cosmos deadens the soul. All that remains beyond our understanding should inspire awe.
> If your string of symbols constitutes a passage of English text, then you could just count the number of words it contains. But this is silly: it would give the sentence "The Sun will rise tomorrow" the same information value as he sentence "The world will end tomorrow" when the second is clearly much more significant than the first. Whether or not we find a message informative depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us.
> [Claude] Shannon stayed clear of the slippery concept of meaning, declaring it "irrelevant to the engineering problem", but he did take on board the idea that information is related to what's new: it's related to surprise. Thought of in emotional terms surprise is hard to measure, but you can get to grips with it by imagining yourself watching words come out of a ticker tape, like they used to have in news agencies. Some words, like "the" or "a" are pretty unsurprising; in fact they are redundant since you could probably understand the message without them. The real essence of the message lies in words that aren't as common, such as "alien" or "invasion".
I've noticed there's some people who just say mean things while trying to be funny, but I haven't cracked the details on what makes these jokes land or flop.
This article feels like the author has taken the concept of one-liner (arguably the densest form of standup comedy) and extended that to be comedy at large. I feel like you could take the Comedian's Comedian podcast episode with Gary Delaney, and get a much more effective lesson with the same content.
Disclosure: I've done standup. It is frightening. It's also a lot of fun.
> Q: Why are cats so good at video games? A: They have nine lives.
firmly belongs in the "physical pain" category for me.
But essentially the same elements used by a good standup, telling a story, saying something like “so I was playing super Mario with my cat, and of course he is wiping the floor with me, because… you know… nine lives” could get a solid laugh. Or a far side like cartoon of a cat playing a video game with a dog, and the dog looking upset while the cat looks smug…
The elements of a joke are there, but you still have to construct it into a delivery vehicle that lands it.
Laughter is a signal to the group that it's not actually a tiger and we can all relax again.
The most powerful versions of that reveal universal, strong and suppressed emotions as well as our basic human fallibility.
Urinal cakes?! I'll never fall for that one again...
Other activities are highly practical: you can learn the theory via a brief rundown, but executing at a high level takes years to decades of practice.
My theory of theory of humour is that humour is in the latter category.
Likewise I think some sophisticated humorists would benefit from reading philosophies of satire, psychology of slapstick, etc, to help hone their craft. But those are not how-to guides.
He lets himself down by saying "all comedy" when he doesn't need to. He's analysing a specific type of joke structure, and that's fine. He doesn't need to overreach like this.
The pattern presented in the article fits that requirement. Maybe it is even equivalent.
But that’s just a necessary condition for a good joke, not a sufficient one.
It's not funny and the frog dies.
::=
Analogies Anagrams Transformations
> I’m awful at jogging. I run slower than Windows 95.
Yeah you have definitely cracked the secret to comedy.
"Us humans are so limited in our capabilities. I'm willing to admit, in many ways, I run slower than Windows 95. God, I'm awful at jogging."
Running is the connection here, that's clear. But it seems to me that jogging should be the punchline, not Windows 95. Win95 works as the setup. Maybe I prefer that because Win95 is a much more specific thing than jogging. The punchline "I was talking about Windows 95 all along!" just feels so arbitrary compared to "I was talking about jogging all along!"
There's also a bit much lifting done in your punchline (double meaning of run + bringing in Win95), but even when you disjoint the two a little more, it doesn't work that well:
"I'm awful at jogging. I run slow... I'm not even the Windows 95 of joggers."
Or is the point that the reference doesn't need to be accurate but just has to catch a general vibe of "old = slow"
1. win95 has waning cultural relevance, and nobody has any fresh memories of dealing with its slowness
2. most of us have seen "windows bad" jokes a million times over by now - it's stale
3. "run" is a pretty weak/generic connection.
Edit: 4 - "I'm bad at running" has a sort of boomer-humor vibe to it, it's less relatable to an audience that's generally in-shape.