How do we make things funny?

This is the second part in my double feature Dissecting the Frog, in which we explore how humour works in writing (and other creative ventures). Last month we looked at the features that make comedy funny in the first place, and now I'll walk you through some more practical applications.

Now that we’ve established what makes stuff funny, we can just go be comic geniuses, right? Not quite. It’s one thing to be able to construct an effective joke, and another to use them in the right context. The next step, then, is to delve into the ways that humour gets used. Broadly speaking, we can categorise most styles of humour under three umbrellas: physical humour, verbal humour, and situational humour (you can also have humour that is specifically sensory, such as funny images or sounds, but as this is ostensibly a writing blog so I won’t go into that in this context).

There are some genres of comedy and literary movements that have established a specific style of humour that is definitive to the genre or movement, but in other cases the same style of humour might be used across a wide range of genres and types of comedy. There are also certain mediums that are better suited to particular styles—have you ever seen a mime make a pun? Tricky. Nevertheless, you will find that the funniest texts will incorporate bits of at least two types of humour to build on the different strengths that each type brings.