Different Types of Humour

 Different Types of Humour

·         Puns: Wordplay, preferred by children, but not uncommon among adults. Overlaps with dry humor.

·         Dry humor: Dry humor is relatively inaccessible humor that lacks strong characteristics. It's not morbid, not violent, not off-color. These are the sort of bad jokes that your uncle or your teacher might tell you.

·         Deadpan humor: Exaggerated calmness and understatement inappropriate to the topic. Overlaps with dry humor and dark humor.

·         Epigrammatic humor: Short, quotable humor that emphasizes brevity, expressed in one- or two-liners, often disguised as a philosophical observation.

·         Dark humor: Humor involving juxtaposing the the serious (the bleakness of existence, death, and dying) and the frivolous. Also called gallows humor.

·         Self-deprecating humor: Making fun of yourself.

·         Sarcasm: Humor with an attitude, used to tease, humiliate, and manipulate people. Overlaps with irony and tongue-in-cheek.

·         Irony: Humor based on deliberate or accidental incongruity.

·         Innuendo: Humor that indirectly hints at something unmentionable.

·         Farce: Characters get themselves into unlikely or exaggerated scenarios and have to think their way out, becoming increasingly ridiculous along the way. Farce can be more intellectual or less intellectual.

·         Tongue-in-cheek: Sustained jokes which are subtle enough not to stand out at first. The expression comes from keeping one's tongue against one's cheek to keep from laughing. Overlaps to a certain extent with sarcasm and deadpan humor.

·         Slapstick: Broad, exaggerated humor usually involving cartoonish violence.

·         Hyperbole: Humor based on extrapolating something beyond a reasonable limit, taking something to a ridiculous extreme.

·         Parody: Deliberate humorous exaggerations of original, fictional works or characters.

·         Satire: Similar to parody, but making fun of actual events or human nature.

 

Type of Slapstick Comedy

Greek buffoons , Court jesters, village idiots and cartoon coyote.

A number of reasons that frequently all combine together.

Loss of dignity

Slapstick often involves a suddenly loss of dignity as someone drops from a high position of respect and self worth to a much lower position. It doesn't matter how self-important the person believes they are if they get dumped into a pool or slapped with a pie they get just as wet or custardy as anyone else and they can't maintain a dignified aspect.

This is why a "wealthy dowager" (to use Krusty's term) getting hit in the face with a pie is funny to pretty much everyone but only someone with an extremely cruel sense of humour would find the same thing happening to a homeless person on the street funny. There is no status for the homeless person to lose and it's not funny it's just assault.

It requires great skill

A lot of slapstick comedy is actually hard to pull off. Buster Keaton is the master of visual comedy but his stuff isn't just buckets of water, pie fights and kicks in the bottom. He is capable of lifting one foot up on a piano and then suddenly lifting the other up so he has two feet on a piano and inevitably comes crashing to the floor. It's a pratfall bt it's a masterful one that nobody else can do except him.

It's often unexpected

Sudden surprises and shocks often make us laugh and slapstick is often totally unexpected and surprising. Someone walking down a street and suddenly falling over can often come as a complete surprise to everyone concerned and that surprise generates laughter.

It's not us

There is a part of us that laughs at the misfortunes of others because of the relief that it's not happening to us. We go through our lives actively avoiding indignity and discomfort whenever we can so when it happens to someone else there is a feeling of relief that it's not us. I have no data to back this up but I'd be fairly sure that women find videos of brides falling over and suffering wedding mishaps much funnier after their own wedding than before (assuming they have a wedding at some point in their lives). When a woman thinks a wedding is in her future then videos showing weddings getting ruined by brides falling over are scary rather than funnier: this could happen to you. But when they've gone through their own wedding without mishap they can suddenly laugh at others who haven't with a sense of relief that it wasn't happening to them.

It's the product of mayhem, and we love mayhem.

There is something attractive about mess and mayhem. It's one of the reasons angry birds is so popular. We love watching organized things descend into chaos which is why we love throwing those birds at those constructions and watching them all come crashing down. It's just something we universally enjoy as long as we don't have to clean up afterwards. Creating mayhem and destruction goes against what we try and do in our modern life but is hugely attractive for us to witness (check out how many people show up to watch buildings being demolished by explosives)

It's often a way for a bad person to get what they deserve

Slapstick is often directed at the villain of the piece and causes them some obvious suffering. When we set up a bad guy as a truly bad person we like to see some degree of retribution and justice served. In some situations this results in their death but in media with a lighter tone it's not appropriate to kill the bad guy and so we need to see them suffer in some way. Having them end up in a muddy puddle is a great way of showing them getting an immediate punishment at the end of the show or movie

 

Slapstick is not just knockabout, slaps and falls and pie fights. My definition is broader: slapstick is simply the human body interacting with the physical world (with objects and with other bodies). You’ve got the extreme, violent form embodied by a trio like the Three Stooges, and the more playful, sometimes subtle form expressed by the French mime and clown, Jacques Tati. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin are somewhere between these two. For a modern take, check out the UK’s Mischief Theatre and their shows - The Play that Goes Wrong, The Bank Robbery that Goes Wrong - and their hilarious TV series, The Goes Wrong Show. This is modern slapstick - physical and visual comedy - at its best.

Looking at slapstick in this broader way means we can include any kind of comedy that uses physical playfulness or visual jokes. Because of this, it is a universal form of humour: people all over the world know what it feels like to trip over their own two feet, or run into a wall, sit on a squeaky metal chair at a funeral, or put on their pants backwards. I’ve toured my physical comedy shows all over the world and they get laughs everywhere I play because the comedy comes from the body and its play with the world around me, not verbal jokes which are limited by whether you understand the language and the culture where the joke might be funny. It’s the universiality of slapstick that makes it so enduring and endearing.

There are many different kinds of humor, and even many different kinds of observational humor. This may not be how they’re officially grouped together, and I’m just making this up based on my own observations, but the way I group them, is there are four different kinds of observational humor. (That I have observed.) Ha, I made a pun. (There’s another one!)

·         Storytelling Observational Humor -This is where a comedian tells a personal story, and makes it funny. The story doesn’t even have to be funny itself, and in fact, it is sometimes a tragic story. Mike Birbiglia tells a story about finding out he has a tumor in his bladder. Not funny you say? I didn’t think so either, but the story combined with his witty comments about the details of the story make it hilarious.

·         Societal Observational Humor- This is where a comedian makes fun of something about society. This kind of observational humor can be seen when comedians make jokes about having to wait in line at the DMV, or complaining about airplane food, or complaining about bad drivers, etc. I also group in topical humor with this category. (Comedy based on current events, like politics, pop-culture, etc.)

·         Situational Observational Humor- This is the kind you were talking about. This kind of humor really has no place on stage, because it’s often “in the moment” and is on a “needed to be there” basis, so there’s really no way to organically integrate it into a stand-up act. If you can find a way to fill the audience in on the details of the situation, and make it funny by explaining what happened beforehand, it becomes storytelling observational humor. However, it CAN be used in TV, movies, or plays where there is a situation happening that doesn’t have to be relayed to an audience later, because the audience sees it happening, and they’re in on the joke.

·         Self-Deprecating Humor (Self Observational Humor)- I’ve already explained this one, but it’s when a comedian makes fun of him/herself.

Besides observational, there are many different kinds of humor. Some of them are:

·         Parody- Making a new, exaggerated version of an already well-known work.

·         Low Comedy- Bathroom humor, fart jokes, etc. You know, 7th grader humor. -.-

·         Surreal Comedy- This is comedy that’s just so weird that it’s funny. A perfect example of this is Monty Python. If you’ve ever seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you know what I’m talking about.

There are also a couple of types of comedy delivery (How someone tells a joke) that some may consider types of humor, but I just consider them “add-ons” to an existing form. The main two I can think of are:

·         Slapstick Humor- This is when a comedian uses exaggerated movements to enhance a joke.

·         Deadpan humor- This is when a comedian speaks in a very monotone voice with little to no expression. Steven Wright is a perfect example of this.

 

Example

1.     This is classic slapstick! We were having our daughter's high school graduation party in our garage. I was just sitting at a table chatting with people when my wife entered the garage from the house carrying a large Costco sheet cake. She was going to put it on a table. Instead, she tripped on a power cord, took two stumbling steps toward me and smashed the cake right in my face!! The cardboard tray folded around my head as I tried to keep her from falling to the floor. Almost everyone was laughing. My wife was simultaneously apologizing to me and trying not to laugh. Finally, she laughed too. I just sat there. I looked around but I couldn't see anything through the thick mass of cake and gooey frosting that covered me from the neck up. I let people take pictures of me and then I was helped into the house and led to the shower. It took me 45 minutes to get clean.

2.     The real life slapstick comedy moment would have occurred when I was living in a “converted school bus” and my loving companion at the time ask me to see if she had a bug bite on her right shoulder blade. The floor space is limited in a school bus so it should've been easy to get into a position to inspect the area in question. But it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought.

As she turned clockwise I turned counter clockwise. I ended up in the vicinity of her left breast. Although I can appreciate nature's beauty this only distracted me from the task at hand. And a sudden unannounced change in plans without a prior agreement might not produce a favorable response.

So we attempted our maneuver a second time. This time we agreed on a direction of spin. But somehow we ended up chasing each other has we turned in a tight circle to the left. When I would speed up, she would speed up, and vice versa. I was afraid we were going to get dizzy until our runaway spin finally fizzled out.

Finally, we agreed that she would remain stationary and I would revolve around her. This seemed like a practical approach, modeled after our own solar system. And it actually worked. I was able to locate the area in question and identify it has a mosquito bite. At that point we were confident about the rest of our day, having faced the first challenge and preserved through team work and clear communication.

Since this all happened in a matter of seconds it definitely qualified as a real life slapstick comedy moment. Especially when we were spinning in circles chasing each other. Like a dog chasing it's tail.

 

The real life slapstick comedy moment would have occurred when I was living in a “converted school bus” and my loving companion at the time ask me to see if she had a bug bite on her right shoulder blade. The floor space is limited in a school bus so it should've been easy to get into a position to inspect the area in question. But it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought.

As she turned clockwise I turned counter clockwise. I ended up in the vicinity of her left breast. Although I can appreciate nature's beauty this only distracted me from the task at hand. And a sudden unannounced change in plans without a prior agreement might not produce a favorable response.

So we attempted our maneuver a second time. This time we agreed on a direction of spin. But somehow we ended up chasing each other has we turned in a tight circle to the left. When I would speed up, she would speed up, and vice versa. I was afraid we were going to get dizzy until our runaway spin finally fizzled out.

Finally, we agreed that she would remain stationary and I would revolve around her. This seemed like a practical approach, modeled after our own solar system. And it actually worked. I was able to locate the area in question and identify it has a mosquito bite. At that point we were confident about the rest of our day, having faced the first challenge and preserved through team work and clear communication.

Since this all happened in a matter of seconds it definitely qualified as a real life slapstick comedy moment. Especially when we were spinning in circles chasing each other. Like a dog chasing it's tail.