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.

Let’s get into each on the three main types in turn, and then we can explore the contexts where they feel most at home.

Styles of humour

Physical humour

Physical comedy is one of the oldest and most universally understood ways of making people laugh. Physicality has the ability to cross the borders of language, culture, age, and social class; its humorous capacity can hold up fairly consistently over decades in a filmed medium, and has even been passed down successfully over centuries in written form. Commedia dell’arte, a form of comedic theatre that sprung from the Italian renaissance, is very heavily based on physical humour, and it is still performed to great delight in the twenty-first century.

Most physical humour can be lumped broadly into two categories: violence and bodily humour. Bodily humour involves anything that enters the body (usually, but certainly not limited to, food and drink), and anything that is excreted from the body (farts, belches, vomit, urine, faecal matter…). This style of humour is beloved by many—particularly children—but is also commonly looked down on for being gross, juvenile, and vulgar.

Humorous violence relies quite heavily on exaggeration and the concept of benign violation. It encompasses any situation where a character might in normal circumstances expect to be hurt, either by experiencing violence at the hand of another person or by dint of their own clumsiness. You can see a lot of this type of humour in genres like slapstick, where characters frequently fall through unsolid things, get jabbed by pointy things, and smack each other around the back of the head.

Physical comedy is not especially subtle, as a rule, and works better the more exaggerated and stylised it is. It’s also a better fit for mediums where there is a visual element, such scripts or screenplays, or in illustrated texts. You could certainly use physical humour in written prose, but you’d have to pay a lot of attention to description to get the joke across effectively.

Verbal humour

For writers, verbal humour is an absolute staple. Given that our trade is in words (at least mine is, and I’m making some assumptions about the rest of you), it is very easy to write humour based on words compared to writing based on physical actions. Verbal humour includes a number of techniques from puns to allusions, and runs the whole gamut of classiness, from children’s joke books to the witticisms of Oscar Wilde. (Shakespeare, of course, runs the whole gamut as well all on his own.) The adaptability of wordplay also means it’s easy to slip into just about anything, regardless of genre and medium—even non-fiction.

Although verbal comedy is easier to write down, it is also less likely to have as broad an appeal as physical humour. It requires a level of shared understanding to be communicated beyond the experience of having a body; whether the audience gets the joke or not is dependent on a number of factors, including their knowledge of the language (or languages) involved, their familiarity with any texts, sayings, or events being referred to, and their collection of life experiences. How many times, for example, have we watched movies as adults that we hadn’t seen since we were kids and been surprised by how many jokes had gone over our heads?

Verbal comedy also tends to struggle more against the test of time. Some jokes have remained funny to generation after generation (from Much Ado About Nothing: “the most peaceable way for you, if you take a thief, is to let him show himself for what he is, and steal out of your company.”), but others have fallen victim to the changes in common knowledge, social norms, language, and even pronunciation (from the same play: “civil, count—civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion.”).

Because of this variable nature of communication, verbal humour can be quite useful for characters (and writers) who are particularly clever, as this type of comedy is an effective vehicle for showing off a little—if you do it right, you can impress the average reader, and those who are in the know get an extra burst of funny from finding the easter egg. You do need to be careful, however; if readers feel like they can’t keep up or like they’re missing the joke entirely, you’ll alienate them to the point where they just stop engaging altogether.

Situational humour

Where both physical and verbal humour are focused on delivery to make a joke, situational humour is making a joke out of the set-up itself. This is where the whole premise is funny, such as the Ministry of Silly Walks and two pairs of long-lost identical twins showing up in the same city. Depending on what the joke is and what it’s playing off of, some context may be needed for real effectiveness—this is particularly relevant for satires and parodies, which have a very specific target or set of targets for their jibes.

Situational humour can’t be used to much effect on its own, but can be a great springboard for priming your audience for the physical and/or verbal jokes that you bulk out the story with. You could also nest humorous situations inside each other—once you’ve established that the theatre producers are deliberately trying to produce the worst show possible, that adds another layer of funny context to each individual situation of approaching the worst director, playwright, and lead actor.

Because situations are pretty central to the construction of a story, their use as comedy is limited: not so much in the medium of storytelling, but certainly in terms of genre. Unless you are already intending to operate primarily in a comedic genre, it’s difficult to insert a funny situation without throwing off the tone. Quite often, situational humour gets rather silly, and requires a high level of suspension of disbelief. So if you’re trying to bring a bit of levity to an otherwise serious, dark, and/or gritty piece of work, I would avoid this type of humour.

(Sub)genres of humour

All too frequently, “comedy” is used to describe the genre as a whole, despite the wide variance we have explored. One can claim to be a fan of comedy films, but there is a very big difference between, say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Hangover, and I would guess that those films don’t share a particularly large overlap in audience. And as writers, it is important to be aware of the genre (or genres) we are writing in so that we can use the relevant genre conventions effectively, including our use of humour.

What follows is a brief, non-comprehensive list of different comedic genres (or subgenres, if you’re taking comedy as a whole as your definition of genre). For simplicity, I am sticking to fairly well-known modern genres, and will not be treading very far into the realm of hybrid genres.

• Slapstick—an exaggerated, primarily physical form of comedy with a strong connection to clowning. It is usually performative, and often involves a lot of props.
• Tragicomedy—a blend of tragic and comic elements combining humour with the catharsis of drama. It is common in classic texts, but has continued to be used recently as well.
• Romantic comedy—a blend of features from both romance and comedy. It makes a lot of use of situational comedy and usually tends towards earnestness more than irony.
• Screwball comedy—a combination of slapstick and romantic comedy primarily seen in film which includes a lot of incongruous situational humour and witty repartee. It is usually focused on a romantic plot and tends to include farcical elements.
• Absurdism (also called surreal humour)—a style of comedy that developed in the 20^th century which is characterised by non-sequiturs, juxtaposition, and nonsense. It works primarily through subverting expectations and incongruity creating increasingly ridiculous situations.
• Farce—a type of comedy that is characterised mainly by extreme levels of exaggeration, often involving ridiculous and unlikely sequences of events. It uses a lot of physical humour, and can frequently be seen in stage performances.
• Satire—an extremely long-lived form of humour which primarily serves to critique problematic aspects of society by ridiculing them. It often does this by using exaggeration, irony, wit, and comparative techniques such as juxtaposition.
• Parody—a humorous form of imitation that mocks the thing it is copying from, similar to satire but less critical and more silly. It frequently makes use of exaggeration as well as the necessary allusion.
• Black comedy (also called dark humour or gallows humour)—humour drawn from grim, usually taboo subjects such as death. It frequently includes satirical elements, and is commonly used to stand against oppression.
• Comedy of manners—a form of social comedy that established itself during the Restoration period of English history that relies largely on wit and satire to create humorous social commentary.
• Situation comedy (sitcoms)—a type of comedy specifically used in the medium of television which (unsurprisingly) focuses heavily on situational humour.

Whatever genres you’re pulling from, and however you use humour in your work, it is very helpful to be aware of what affect you are creating and how it functions. This knowledge will allow you to better understand the ways that moments of comedy interact with other beats and how the overall tone is formed, and it will arm you with the ability to effectively alter that tone to suit your goals.

Being funny once in a while is rather easy, but being funny on purpose—and doing it well—is very, very hard. Now that you’ve had a poke around inside the frog of humour with me, I hope that you can take the opportunity to sharpen those comedic skills.