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What makes something funny? NOTE: This is Part One of a three-part article.   Part Two Part Three There are various schools of thought as to what makes acting work. There are also schools of thought as to what makes comedy work. What is humor? What makes something funny? And, since in voice-over work, you're usually handed a script, that may or may not be humorous – can you make something funny? Or is the humor already built in, so that all you have to do is read it? The answer is, a little bit of both. And, unlike acting theory, humor theory is at least partially subject to scientific investigation. Someday, neurologists might even be able to tell us exactly why we laugh. For now, we'll give it a try ... (By the way, here's our article on various theories of acting.) To fully explain how humor works would take a book – several in fact, including maybe a volume on human neurology and even anthropology ... because laughter is rooted deep in ourselves and our collective past. Our objective here is simply to give you a crib sheet. But let's have at it for a bit ... Even among scientists and highly experienced comic actors, there are many theories as to what makes something funny to us. Psychologists have identified no less than 41 types of humorous situations. The scientists keep getting closer to pinpointing the various factors, using techniques that include real-time brain scans. But, like driving your car, as a voice actor you don't have to know exactly how it works, only that it does ... and that there are different types of engines, etc. Here are what people consider to be the various engines of comedy: Theories of Humor (a partial list) Relief. We're inherently nervous and afraid. Psychological tension builds. When something happens to reduce that tension, we laugh. Freud supposed that the release is triggered by our realizing that our fear or expectation was unwarranted. Superiority. Someone slips on a banana peel, and it's funny. Why? You're smarter than them and wouldn't have done that. Or, on the dark side of this theory, people tend to laugh at individuals that are ugly or unusual in some way. It's not polite to do that anymore, but historically you could take this tendency to the bank. Incongruous Juxtaposition. This explanation has many variations, maybe because it is among the most common type of humor. For example, this comes into play when the late George Carlin notes* that "jumbo shrimp" is contradictory, or that -- despite all the concern over drug culture -- every town in America has a big store sign that says, "DRUGS." Script-based Semantics. While there are many ways to express humor (for example in artwork, a silent movie, or mime), this theory focuses on written or spoken humor. Essentially, the mechanism is that a sentence, or the scene it describes, can be taken two different, incompatible ways. The listener is thinking one way. But on hearing the punch line, they realize the speaker meant it another way. General Verbal Humor Theory. This is an effort by researchers Raskin and Attardo to quantify the effects of variation in how the joke is written. Tracking 6 factors in its construction – for example, how is it presented (as a riddle, or as a conversation, or a story, or an aside, etc.?), is there a butt of the joke (e.g., a person it's about), how is the situation described (simply, or in detail?), and so on. Computational-Neural. Talk about timing! This model adds to Incongruity-Resolution theory by attributing laughter to neural activity and the timing of neural networks as one assumption is replaced by another – thus releasing spontaneous energy. It holds that humor is purely a biological phenomenon, yet the theory encompasses not just the storyline, but also the storyteller's manner and social factors. It explains why monkeys and even rats have been shown to have a sense of humor. As neuroscience progresses, look for some interesting future findings in this analysis. Benign violation. Combining other theories, this one suggests that three conditions must be satisfied: 1) Something threatens the listener's sense of order; 2) the threat is understood to be benign; 3) both interpretations are seen at the same time. For example, a comedian's routine might not coincide with your sense of the world as it ought to be, but he or she is funny since you know they're just someone on a stage. Or maybe it's that, deep down you know they're right, yet the world survives. For example, some of Richard Prior's work. (Want to explore this topic further? Start at Wikipedia's much more detailed and even longer list of Comedy Theories. ) Our own "theory" is much more simple For every theory about what makes us laugh, there may be a question. For example, babies start giggling at 3 to 4 months. Is it purely neurological, or has it taken them that long to established certain assumptions that can then be violated by irony or incongruity? Also, people are 30 times more likely to laugh when they are in a group, rather than being alone. Laughter is contagious. The human brain appears to have circuitry that's dedicated to sensing laughter. Fine, but does that mean that most of a crowd's laughter follows no particular theory? We prefer to offer our own "lay" theory, drawn from various studies and many years of personal observation. Whatever the reason, most comedy seems rooted in some or all of the following:
Very often, you will encounter humor that is a combination of two or more such situations. Consider adopting the philosophy of "Whatever works." And we would be remiss if we didn't mention that old saw that goes back at least to the days of Vaudeville:
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