What does it mean to be funny?

Over the next couple of post cycles, I'm dedicating my reflection posts to exploring how humour works in a two-part series called Dissecting the Frog. This month, our first part is about the features that may make something funny; next month, we'll look into different styles and genres of comedy.

There is an old quote from E B White which (when paraphrased) maintains that analysing humour is like dissecting a frog: you may understand it better at the end, but the frog dies. The quote was later co-opted by comedians such as Barry Cryer and altered to say that, as well as the frog dying, nobody laughs. Sounds grim.

However, if we really want to understand how humour works—and how to deploy it effectively—it’s helpful to disassemble a few frogs. For many people, comedy is an instinctual talent, and they can easily dip into those instincts every time they want to draw a laugh. On the other hand, relying entirely on instinct isn’t possible for everyone, and that shouldn’t stop anyone from learning. And even for people who are already confident in certain aspects of humour, it can be more challenging to develop skills in different writing or performance styles without making use of some analysis to give them a clear direction for improvement.

So that leads us to the million-dollar question: what makes things funny? Arriving at a satisfactory answer is a complex process that a lot of academic study has gone into, and there are a number of theories exploring the neurological details. It’s just tricky to pin down something as nebulous as why we find things funny, especially when humour is extremely subjective. Now, I am not an researcher in this field, nor do I claim to be an expert, so if you really want to get stuck into the weeds you’ll have to do that on your own initiative. I do, however, have a few broad ideas about some key features of humour that could be a good jumping-off point, or could at least provide some illumination if you aren’t so inclined to reading academic studies.