by Tim Ferguson
The evolutionary imperative has also equipped men and women with subtly different senses of humour. In 2009, research by psychologists Kristofor McCarty at Northumbria University in England, showed that women find a man’s sense of humour a key attribute in his attractiveness—findings confirmed by every women’s magazine on the planet. (‘Why is humour so sexy? Exploration into quality humour production as a possible indicator of intelligence’).
While there are many situations in which a light-hearted outlook is desirable in itself (such as smiling in the face of hardship), the research suggests that a sense of humour demonstrates an ability to think quickly and laterally, to surprise and anticipate, showing confidence and cleverness—attributes directly relevant to the ancient skills of hunting, fighting and shelter-building. A man who makes a woman laugh is proving to her that he is capable of meeting danger. Sadly, as we all know, time erodes a man’s ability to surprise his partner. ‘His jokes used to be funny, but now I’m tired of them. Besides, he’s already built the hut.’
Men also include a sense of humour on their list of a woman’s desirable attributes, but it rates lower than long legs, big boobs and intelligence (also, incidentally, survival attributes). When was the last time you heard a guy say, ‘I just want to meet a woman with a sense of humour’? According to McCarty, the average man would rather a woman laugh at his jokes than he laugh at hers.
Learning to Laugh
The most reliable stimulus for laughter is tickling. And yet even here the laughter response can be enhanced by mock-threatening behaviour.
For instance, imagine you are about to tickle a toddler. Do you simply reach out your hands and tickle? Is any part of the baby—e.g. their shoulders or scalp—as ticklish as any other? Do you remain silent as you tickle? Do you tickle the same spot throughout the exercise?
Of course not. To be effective, tickling should be an unfolding drama. A popular tickling routine follows the form of the rhyme below:
Round and round the garden,
Like a teddy-bear.
One step, two step,
Tickly under there!
The routine accompanying the rhyme goes as follows:
The tickler begins by ever-so-lightly drawing circles in the victim’s palm, using a voice that is light but full of portent: ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear …’
The tickler finger-steps up the victim’s arm with the delicacy and care of a stalking cat, using a tone that increases tension in the victim: ‘One step … two step …’
Finally, the tickler pounces swiftly, using misdirection to evade the victim’s defences. The tickler’s voice changes to a rapid and threatening attack: ‘Tickly under there!’
The tickler strikes at the armpits, neck, waist, groin, inner thighs, the back of the knees or the soles of the feet. Nowhere else on the body will reliably induce laughter. Why these points?
Our DNA got its act together when savage predators were a fact of life. An attack on the vulnerable points mentioned above would sever vital arteries, gouge essential organs or, in the case of the soles of the feet, render the victim incapable of flight. The caveman might survive without his elbows. His skull and shinbones might withstand a tiger’s jaws and he might even have a chance with a chomp out of his buttock. But a savage bite to the neck? Forget it.
When vulnerable body parts are threatened we react instinctively by moving and making noise. In the stone age this behaviour would alert fellow tribe members to the presence of danger, increasing the victim’s and the tribe’s chances of survival. By training a child to respond to play-danger, parents are unconsciously teaching their kids to recognise their vulnerable points and respond effectively when genuinely threatened.
To make an audience laugh, however, we don’t have to inspire fear or savage their vital organs. If that were the case, Dawn of the Dead would be a comedy instead of a horror film. But the trappings of horror (surprise, disorder, an assault on vulnerable points) are an integral part of any comic strategy. Ralph Waldo Emerson called comedy the ‘balking of the intellect’. When the intellect is confounded, the primal mind responds. Comedy upsets order, reveals hidden meaning, finds unexpected connections, reverses situations, exploits blindspots, exposes vulnerabilities, highlights logical flaws and subverts expectations.
Fear! Surprise! Yes, these are our weapons.
Chapter One:
Gag Principles
‘If only smart people like your shit, it ain’t that smart.’
—Chris Rock
The first two chapters deal with straight-up gags. Though they are often used in comic dialogue, straight-up gags are essentially stand-alone jokes that don’t rely on character humour. They’re the domain of stand-up comedy and wisecracks. Narrative gags, that is, gags that drive a comic story, are covered later in the book.
Every joke contains its own ‘DNA’: its own combination of known qualities, albeit often in an original context. Both straight-up and narrative gags share characteristics that are drawn from the overriding principles of comedy such as surprise, negation, metaphor, irony and character-comedy. Using successful examples from comedians and narrative comedies, this chapter explores the basic components, the individual genes that represent the principles of comedy.
The purpose of outlining the principles is to help you on the days when nothing funny is coming to mind. Instead of eyeing the sharp objects in the house, you can apply these principles to the theme, characters and situation of your comic story.
Simplicity and Surprise
Comedy demands simplicity. If it takes ten seconds to work out the meaning of a punchline, you won’t get a laugh; the audience has already moved on. Clarity is key.
But don’t be fooled—simplicity ain’t easy. Many a comedy writer has come unstuck by layering their comedy with clever ambiguities. Any monkey can make a fruitcake, but it can take years of practice to get a soufflé right every time—even though it must be the simplest dessert on the planet.
Every comic scene must have a clear purpose, though its machinations may be complex. Farce, in particular, can involve a lot of doors opening and closing as characters bustle about to achieve their goals. This farcical chaos, however, must be driven by a simple idea. The core qualities and objectives of each character must be crystal clear.
Why? Because the best ideas are simple. We see them and slap our foreheads—‘Why didn’t I think of bulldog clips?’ Einstein’s formula, E=mc2, turned the world of physics on its head. A DNA strand is an elegant double helix, a far simpler form than scientists Watson and Crick had imagined. Genius in any field can be found in those who distil a complicated set of variables into a simple principle. Or, to put it another way, simple ideas can generate complex meanings.
In terms of gag-writing, brevity and simplicity keep a joke a step ahead of the audience while keeping them in touch with what the joke is about. As for writing sitcom, cutting unnecessary story—or character—complications and maintaining a brisk pace are vital to making an episode work. This is not to say that a joke, story or characters can’t be dense with detail. Arrested Development (created by Mitchell Hurwitz) is a sitcom with complex characters and multiple inter-connected storylines. But each of these elements are presented with clarity. The show moves at a breakneck pace, averaging sixty scenes per twenty-one-minute show compared to, for instance, The Golden Girls (created by Susan Harris) which averages eight scenes per show. (Twenty-one minutes, by the way, is referred to as a ‘commercial half-hour’. It excludes credits and ad breaks.) To cope with this pace, the audience needs the clearest possible story. Bewilderment has its place (for instance, when the audience momentarily shares a character’s confusion at events that have escaped their control), but too much bewilderment leads the audience to conclude the writers are also confused. There is no room for embellishment or diatribe. The elegant clarity of Arrested Development is testament to the writers’ discipline; they surrender to the fundamental law of narrative: the story is king.
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Clarity begins with the questions, ‘What is the heart of this story? What is the heart of this character?’ This does not discount subtlety as a comic tool, but the subtlety is in the delivery, not the substance. A character can expose their qualities and intentions through choices that are delicate or even implied, but they must nevertheless be clear or the audience will miss the point. A slight nod can mean the end of the world or the beginning of a great love—or both—but we must understand, in that moment, what it means.
In comedy, simplicity serves. All else is vanity.
All punchlines, even the most straightforward, have an element of surprise. If they didn’t, we’d duck the punch. Like boxers, comedians and comedy writers use misdirection to get past our defences. The primal mind doesn’t like surprises: they could be life-threatening. Laughter is an involuntary expression of the relief that follows.
Humans are capable of the most outlandish flights of fancy, yet when hearing a story, we tend to make logical connections based on what is familiar. Humour exploits this tendency. Just when the audience thinks they know where a joke is headed, it hits them with an entirely different outcome. The result is laughter. (This is why knowing the principles of joke construction can suck the fun out of hearing them: you’re aware of all the possibilities in the set-up. Maybe that’s why comedians are so depressed.)
An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman walk into a bar—and nothing fucking happens.
—Jerry Sadowitz
Characters are more interesting when, while remaining true to their fundamental qualities, they still surprise us. When a comic character is in a fix, their distortions and cover-ups should exceed or defy our expectations. After all, if we might have come up with the same solution, how can we be surprised? We laugh when a clever character ties themselves in knots or an idiot solves a complex problem with a simple solution.
Misdirection in comedy plays on an audience’s tendency to assume a certain meaning from given words, phrases, titles, the flow of a scene or a popular song or quote.
I hate it when you fall asleep on the wheel—and it’s a pottery-making wheel.
—Elliot Goblet
In the right context, even the obvious can be a surprise:
If you’re being chased by a police dog, try not to go through a tunnel, then on to a little seesaw, then jump through a hoop of fire. They’re trained for that.
—Milton Jones
No-one is safe. Assumptions about identity, sensibility and intention can all fall prey to a comedy-writer’s trickery. There’s a well-known guessing-game scenario that goes:
A man takes his sick son to the hospital. But at the hospital, the doctor looks at the boy and says, ‘This is my son!’ How can this be?
It’s particularly troubling to see educated women scratch their heads at this quandary because the doctor is, of course, a woman. For some reason the first image most people conjure is a man in a white coat wearing a stethoscope. Similarly, we tend to assume footballers, boxers and terrorists are all male, though there’s no reason for us to do so.
But it’s not just sex-role assumptions that are open to manipulation …
A wife is in the bedroom. Her husband walks in with a duck under his arm.
HUSBAND: Darling, this is the pig I’ve been screwing.
WIFE: That’s not a pig, it’s a duck.
HUSBAND: I was talking to the duck.
Most of the time assumptions work in our favour. Traffic, for example, moves with relative safety due to countless assumptions made by drivers. The colours red, amber and green have an agreed (though arbitrary) meaning to everyone with a licence. Comedy relies heavily upon an audience drawing upon this cognitive lexicon.
Surprise can be generated by misdirection concerning a character’s beliefs or intentions:
I’m on a hunger strike. Three weeks—no hunger.
—Michael Klimczak
They lie about marijuana, tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well—you just realise it’s not worth the fucking effort.
—Bill Hicks
Or misdirection concerning a character’s role or situation:
People come up to me and say, ‘Steve, what is film editing?’ And I say, ‘How should I know? You’re the director.’
—Steve Martin
A girl phoned me the other day and said, ‘Come on over, there’s nobody home’. I went over. Nobody was home.
—Rodney Dangerfield
The primary reason for keeping jokes as brief as possible is to maintain surprise. While an audience listens to a joke, unconsciously their minds dart ahead to anticipate the punchline. With enough time, unless it’s a gob-smacking surprise, they may work out where the joke is going. Brevity keeps the teller one step ahead.
Brevity also means that the audience is given the minimum information. The less they know, the more assumptions they make and the easier they are to misdirect. Essentially, it’s sleight of hand using words instead of florid hand gestures and a drugged rabbit.
Shaggy-dog gags may take a long time to execute but they too are built on the sparest information—it’s simply repeated ad nauseum. The following gag can be drawn out to epic proportions as the man crawls over laneways, parks, major highways, neighbours’ gardens or Mount Kilimanjaro. Yet these details, as colourful as they may be, are redundant to the gag itself. They provide the misdirecting ‘shagginess’ while the ‘dog’ is still simple and spare. Despite the apparent surfeit of detail a vital piece of information is omitted from the set-up.
A man at his local pub is so drunk, he crawls home, pulling himself hand-over-hand, inch by exhausting inch. (Elaborate at will.) When he finally gets home, his wife says, ‘Paddy, you’re drunk! And you left your wheelchair at the pub again’.
—Unattrib.
Note that the punchline does not state directly that the man is a paraplegic, but uses a new story element, the wheelchair, to imply the crucial information. A punchline such as, ‘When he gets home he’s exhausted because he’s a paraplegic’ falls flat because the information is given outside the context of the story. A justifiable story element keeps the audience within the fictional scenario—and implies the truth rather than states it. A punchline that implies a comic contradiction is usually superior to one that is baldly stated.
For example, there are many ways to highlight a wife’s talent for remembering every mistake her husband has made. An example of a good gag on this topic:
Any married man should forget his mistakes—there’s no use in two people remembering the same thing.
—Vicky’sjokes.com
Seventeen words can say so much!
The words in this gag are kept to a bare minimum. The gag doesn’t even mention wives—their role in the joke is implicit in the use of the term ‘married man’.
The gag is simple. No examples of married men’s mistakes are listed.
The contrast between women and men that the joke suggests is clear—men forget and women remember.
The punchline asks the audience to work albeit for a split second. The punchline assumes that a wife is certain to remember her husband’s mistakes. The audience has to draw this conclusion to get a laugh. The lead-in offers advice to married men. The punchline draws on the common knowledge that partners divide chores, e.g. ‘You remember to pick up the kids and I’ll remember to mow the lawn’. The punchline accords with general conceptions about married life, so the reasoning behind the observation isn’t confusing.
An example of a bad gag on this topic:
‘There’s no point in a married man remembering the time he set fire to the house. Wives remember everything—she’ll remind him if he forgets.’
Twenty-five words can say too much. The mention of the man setting fire to the house pushes the joke in a specific direction when the topic is general. The punchline doesn’t refer to the fire so the listener can lose the main drift of the gag.
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�Wives remember everything’ is a direct declaration of the message of the joke. The audience doesn’t have to think—they are passive.
‘She’ll remind him if he forgets’ fails for the same reason. A female comedian might make it work by delivering it with a wry or threatening inflection, but without that, the punchline does the audience’s thinking for them.
So how can we tell if a gag is good or bad?
Comedy is not an exact science, but the principles above can be boiled down into the following criteria you can match against all gags.
BREVITY
A gag should be boiled down to its bare minimum. Even a shaggy-dog joke needs a tight punchline. While audiences listen to a gag, their minds are racing to guess where the joke is going. The longer the gag takes, the longer they have to devise their own punchlines. Keeping a gag lean helps the teller stay a step ahead of the listener. Packing in as much implied information as possible gives a gag punch.
SIMPLICITY
Avoid distractions. The elements of a given gag should relate directly to the punchline.
CONTRAST
The contrasts in negations, juxtapositions, distortions or misinterpretations should be stark.
LET THE AUDIENCE DO THE WORK
Instead of openly declaring the gag’s message, you can allow the audience to draw their own conclusion from the bare information the gag gives them.
EXERCISE
1. Create a commonplace scenario:
For example, A man crawling home.
2. Identify every likely assumption associated with it: the setting, the characters, the dialogue …
For example: The man lives in a city or town, he has been drinking in a pub or club, alcohol has robbed him of the ability to walk but he is otherwise able-bodied, the home he crawls towards is his home …
3. Look for other circumstances that would support the scenario. These can range from the commonsense to the ridiculous.
For example: The man is literally legless, he’s dying of thirst, he’s smelling his way home, he’s left crumbs of salt-and-vinegar crisps on the asphalt to guide his way, he’s crawling to a home—not his home …