What Makes Something Funny?

Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to TestTube Plus today. As you can see, I am here with my buddy Matt Lieberman, and I am Trace. And this week, this is episode 4 of 5 on humor. Humor is pretty pervasive throughout our society, so we invited one of my comedian friends here in to talk to us about what makes something funny. If you haven't seen the other episodes of TestTube Plus yet from this series, make sure you go back and do that. We talked about where humor lives in our brain. That one was really good. We talked about how humor is part of our evolution. We even talked about humor bots. Yeah, which I actually found pretty mind-blowing. Yeah, so talking about artificial intelligence and whether we can program that. But today, again, what makes something funny? There are a few theories out there about what makes something funny, Matt. I'm sure you've got your own. Yes, and they're not quite as scientific, but I'll see if I can keep up. OK, so we've got the superiority theory. We talked about these a little earlier. It makes you feel better about yourself because you made fun of someone else. Right, schadenfreude. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, this is like his baby, and he says that humor arises from a, quote, sudden glory felt when we recognize our supremacy to others and we're laughing at the misfortunes of others. This is the essence of slapstick humor. Right. Somebody's getting kicked in the nuts. Yeah, it's saying, I'm glad that that's not me. I'm laughing because I don't have to deal with that kind of pain. I don't have that kind of stress in my life. Look at that idiot. Poor guy. Yeah, poor guy or idiot. If they deserve it, then I think it's compounded even further. Yeah, and then there's the incongruity theory. That's when two things don't go together. I imagine this is something that you- That's something that I think is far wider spread across all of humor. It's just the idea of absurdity, and absurdity is the key element at the core of almost all humor, where something does not make sense, something does not add up. Like the idea of, I don't know, a buff, oiled up Bernie Sanders. That is weird. The idea of Bernie Sanders, most people, whether they like him or they don't like him, they aren't necessarily thinking of him as a sex symbol. So to put- Yeah, shirtless and just like, you know, massive Arnold body with lots of oil. Very like tan. Sure, but that's my point is- His white hair would really stand out though. Right. It'd be like, shock, a white hair. It is, I mean, it's like, I don't know, like a turkey buying groceries. Right, oh, there was a joke that I read relative to the incongruity theory. Two fish are in a tank, and one fish looks at the other fish and says, you know how to drive this thing? So what makes, it's really a bet, it's really a bet. It's not- But it was an example used by an academic. But it 100% is the incongruity theory. It's the idea that fish can't drive. So if fish can't drive, but they're saying that they're driving, on some level that is funny because it doesn't make sense. Right. If something doesn't add up, the wider the divide between what makes sense in that context and what is actually happening, the straight and the absurd. So if it's a scene or if it's a scene between two people, let's say, like you're watching a play or a video or just having a conversation, and one of you is behaving completely normally, and the other person is doing something abnormally. This is a bad example, but let's say, you have a bad neighbor who keeps letting their dogs poop in your lawn. Every time the door opens, the dogs run right into your lawn, poop, and run right back. And you're trying to argue with this guy like, hey, you gotta stop letting them do this. And instead of getting defensive or treating it as something wrong, the person is just like, yeah, they keep crapping in your yard, that's so funny. Right, right. It's like, you really need to clean up your yard. Your yard is filthy. That is absurd, because an ordinary person would not be that lackadaisical and happy about it and not consider that odd behavior. Right. So incongruity is essentially that, like you were saying. Ambiguity, illogical impossibility, irrelevance, or inappropriateness. There's also the relief theory, which we mentioned earlier. I don't know if this is as important, that's the idea that you feel relief based on your humor? I think that it is very important. It's actually very important, because if you are holding in a lot of tension, laughter is at its core a release of tension, at least according to some prevailing theories. And if the thing that is making you laugh in some way touches on the source of that anxiety, you're gonna laugh that much harder. So like, if you're in a bad marriage and you have, you're watching something funny, or there's a funny joke that's related to bad marriages and somehow you laugh at that. You're gonna laugh that much more because you not only identify with the people on screen, but it also is you releasing the tension because your marriage maybe isn't quite that bad. Right, so it's almost a combination of relief and the idea of superiority, and like, ooh, gosh, I'm glad I'm not there. Right, it's like- But I recognize this and I can identify with it. Why is, for example, the Dilbert comic strip so funny to people who work in white-collar jobs? I actually don't know why it's that funny. I actually, I used to love it as a kid, even though I didn't know what they were talking about, because I liked- It's a talking dog and a talking cat. The characters, yeah, and like, and you know, they're kind of miserable, and it's satirizing those kinds of white-collar elements, you know, memos that don't matter, meetings that go on forever, clients that are terrible. And because they associate with that, people can find it funny, and they will maybe tap into a bit of stress in their own lives and find more relief. They'll find it especially funny. Okay, I get that, for sure. There's also, this one I really like, the mechanical theory, which I'd never heard of before. So this is kind of breaking down gags into something like component parts. Sure, so in comedy training, or especially in improv or sketch comedy writing, there's something called, the Upright Citizens Brigade calls it game, and I think this is the easiest way to explain it. And it's that once you establish a pattern, which is, let's say, let's go back to the example of the neighbor whose dog's pooping in your yard. Right, sure. Every time that that door opens, let's say you finally get your lawn clean, and you're about to go back in your house, and then as soon as that other door opens, we know those dogs are gonna come and poop in your yard again. If we as an audience have found humor in this premise, in the premise of the dog's pooping, every time that door opens, we know what's gonna happen, and if the comedy's written well, the effects of it are gonna heighten, it's gonna be somehow bigger. Let's say maybe there's more dogs, like at first it's just one dog, then it's two dogs come out, then it's five dogs, and it's like, wait. Then the dogs have diarrhea, then the diuretic dogs do something else. Sure, then the neighbor comes out with the dogs and is pooping with the dogs. Right, just kind of keep building on that, and that's like the mechanical idea, is that we can- The more you repeat it until it can no longer realistically be repeated without being strange. Right, it's not funny anymore because it's just too out there. Exactly, but at the same time, you need time between these repetitions of the pattern to allow the audience to settle back and not be as engaged. Okay. It's what's called resting the game. There's also something called the benign violation theory, which it builds on work by a linguist. It integrates existing humor theories, and it tries to say that humor occurs when three different things are satisfied. So tell me if this sounds about right. The situation is a violation. Yes. The situation is benign, and both of those perceptions occur simultaneously. So picture a Venn diagram, right? Play fighting and tickling makes us laugh. Both of those things make us laugh, but only if it's not too much play fighting or too little tickling. Because- It has to fit in the middle. On some level, you have to be affected emotionally or psychologically by what's going on for it to actually have a real reaction. My, the best sketch teacher I ever had, and I think honestly, she's one of the funniest and smartest comedic writers working today. Her name's Heather Ann Campbell. She talked about how when we were all living before society, whether we were living in caves or on the plains in the wilderness, you're sitting around a campfire at night with your family or the few people you know, or maybe just alone, and there's a rustling in the bushes, and you feel a tension mount because you don't know what's on the other side of those bushes. It could be a panther that's gonna pounce out and kill you and your whole family, and for a moment, you're terrified, and then all of a sudden, out hops a little bunny, an adorable little bunny. You would start laughing hysterically, not just because on a social level, you are all trying to dispel each other's tension, but because you had an expectation of something that would, what was that first rule? The situation is a violation. It's a violation. So in this case, you have something invading your personal space, something that you cannot control, whose identity you cannot ascertain, and then it's benign. It's not a rule too. It's benign, but it's also a violation. Exactly, that makes it funny. So at its core, this explains why edgier humor can offer bigger results, bigger laughter, bigger reactions, because the closer you can get to someone's threshold of tension or fear without tipping over onto the side where they're offended or scared, the harder that they will laugh when they see that it is benign. Got it. It's almost like understanding these theories can help you look at almost all comedies and figure out what tools they were using to craft all of these different jokes. Yeah, I would say on some level, while you do have to have some connection to your own humanity to make comedy, I think a comedian is at their core a scientist and a mathematician, because all comedy, at least written comedy, is math. It is not only jokes per minute, but how to space out those jokes, set them up, and pay them off in a way that feels organic, that gives the audience enough time to recover from a big laugh, understand what's going on, see where you're going, and then when you reveal the twist, laugh because they're surprised. They're surprised or they're shocked or they recognize something within themselves. Which is also kind of informs what we've been talking about before. It takes a lot of different parts of your brain in order to make comedy work, and you can't just program a robot to do it, because there is something to be said for understanding human nature and the audience that you are performing for, as well as the audience maybe that it was intended for, because maybe those are different. You have a really great example of how we can cross from being funny into being not funny and play that border with your most recent Nuclear Family episode, which is, for those that don't know, that's Matt's show, one of his and also the others who work down at SourceFed in LA, and you had a show about heroin. Yes. Can you give us a brief, how did that end up going kind of wrong? We launched a brand new comedy channel, sketch comedy channel, called Nuclear Family a few weeks ago, and the first video that we put out was called People Try Heroin for the First Time. Now, at this point, most people, if you've been on Facebook or on YouTube, you've seen at least one of these BuzzFeed experiential videos, which started very, very small and benign, and they were interesting because it was a simple concept that you could digest, just people trying something new. Since those benign videos, in order to continue to gain people's interest and maintain viewership, BuzzFeed has escalated. Mechanical theory? Yeah, exactly. They've had to heighten what they were doing in order to maintain interest, but what happened with our video, people fell into two camps. There were people who knew what it was, saw it as a parody of BuzzFeed, and thought it was really funny because they saw that same escalation because they watched those videos, and they thought that we did a really good job with it. Then the other half were either people who thought that it was real and were horrified that a company would take heroin so lightly and people would take heroin so lightly that they would actually subject themselves to trying it on camera to gain viewership and were very angry about it. Meanwhile, the people, us in the video, our lives go to hell in these five minutes. You watch us completely destroy ourselves. It is 100% anti-drug, but that's that benign and violation. People felt that we had stepped too far. It was too far over their comfort threshold for them to see the humor in what we were doing, that we were not making fun of heroin. We were making fun of BuzzFeed using heroin as an extreme example. That's super interesting. Guys, if you wanna watch the Nuclear Family Heroin episode, we'll put a link down in the description. Matt, if you wanna plug something else other than the Nuclear Family, where can people come find you on Twitter? Sure, you can find me on Twitter at Matt Lieberman. It's M-A-T-T-L-I-E-B-E-R-M-A-N. I mostly talk about television, sometimes about comedy, sometimes I'll post things that I like that are funny. If you're in Los Angeles and you wanna see some great live comedy, I'm a member of a sketch team called DJ Fawcett that performs at the Iowa West Comedy Theater the first Sunday of every month. All right, well, thanks for watching TestTube Plus, everybody, we will see you tomorrow with some more stuff about comedy, but this time we're going the other way. What is not funny? Oh boy, this is gonna be real good.