Let’s look at some theory about humour. We need to think about what comedy is and what makes people laugh. If you’re not interested in why people laugh, comedy is not for you. Some basic understanding of what we’re actually doing is the single best way to “level up” at the beginning.

What makes people laugh? That question is both simple and complicated at the same time. Philosophers, neurologists, psychologists, sociologists and comedians have been coming with theories for centuries. It’s a bit like Science. Science has come up with heaps of legitimate theories, but none of them answer absolutely everything and most of them contradict each other. Scientists have been trying to come up with a Grand Unified Theory (or “Theory Of Everything”) that ties it all together and explains it all, but they haven’t been able to yet. Comedy has lots of theories, and they’re all legit, but none of them explain everything.

There’s three dominant theories of what makes people laugh. Most of the other ideas fall into these three categories. All three of them are solid explanations for what people find funny, but none of them get “One Ring To Rule Them All” status, and I’m not sure that we even want a Theory Of Everything in comedy. But all three of these ideas are legit, and they all translate into techniques for how to write comedy, so you need to know them.

Ready? Let’s do this.

Superiority Theory.

This is a theory that the philosopher Aristotle came up with way back in the year 355 BC, in his smash hit “The Poetics”. Aristotle explained that we laugh when we feel better than someone. This idea might sound mean, but it’s more common than you probably think: There are examples of it everywhere.

You’ll see it in the physical comedy of people slipping on banana peels, doing clumsy “pratfalls,” or farting in public. You’ll see it in the jokes about people who are less smart or less right than “us” (the comedian bringing the audience in on the joke makes it feel as though we’re on the same side). You’ll see it when comedians talk about products, signs, rules, customs or behaviours that make no sense. You can even find it in Self-Deprecating Humour, where the performer makes jokes about themselves and invites the audience members to feel superior to the actual comedian. Either way, the idea is that the audience members can experience joy from feeling better off than someone else.

It’s a basic concept, and it’s very common in humour. It also has a dark side. We don’t always feel great about laughing at someone’s shitty predicament, either. There’s a German word, schadenfreude, which translates roughly as the feeling of joy at witnessing someone else’s misfortune. There’s also a Greek word, epicaricacy, which means pretty much the same thing. These words recognise Superiority Theory as a real thing, but the kind of joy that schadenfreude describes is supposed to be a guilty shameful pleasure, more likely something we giggle to ourselves about than laugh out loud about in public.

A comedian who constantly talks about how everything and everyone is inferior to him is very hard to like. Audience members don’t always feel good about siding with the arrogant douche-bag. The comedian who relies too heavily on Superiority Theory walks a fine line between looking like an observational genius or just a nasty smug prick. It’s also a theory which needs a victim for all of its jokes.

There’s the idea the people always talk about when they discuss stand up comedy. It’s the difference between “punching up” and “punching down.” Punching Up is ridiculing wealthy and powerful people and institutions. We don’t just consider Punching Up to be acceptable; We view it as an essential role of comedy, making important social commentary by challenging authority and establishing solidarity with audiences.

Punching Down is about feeling superior to people with disabilities, people in minority groups, poor people, disenfranchised people, etc. It’s not considered acceptable. There’s been a lot of outcry over recent comedy specials by Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais who both chose to make trans people the target of jokes for the bulk of both their specials. These comedians are wealthy, famous and arguably powerful, and both of them chose to “Punch Down” at a group of people who considered one of the most vulnerable minorities in society today. Both comics have argued that trans people and the LGBTQ+ community are far from powerless, but whether that’s true or not it’s not considered cool and the respective comedians have both been held to account for it.

There’s a bit more to say about that particular issue, but it’s worth noting that the whole concept of Punching Up and Punching Down, and the claim that every joke has a victim, is linked completely to the Superiority Theory of comedy. As you’ll see, it’s not an issue for the other two comedy theories.

Relief Theory.

Relief Theory is about tension and release. It’s the theory that laughter comes from relief, or from a release of pressure. It could be relief that something unpleasant or dangerous is revealed to be harmless and silly. It’s the humour that comes from discovering that something that looked or sounded menacing is really something minor with something amplifying the length of it’s shadows or sounds it makes.

Psychologists claim that laughter in these circumstances is primal, that it goes right back to the times of cave dwellers and dinosaurs. The idea is that our brains are hard-wired to create distress when we imagine potential danger and that we release that psychological distress through laughter when we know we don’t need it. Sigmund Freud recognised that we aren’t regularly threatened by sabre-tooth tigers anymore, but we still accumulate psychic distress through modern living and having to observe society’s rules, and that having to release this stress regularly is important for our wellbeing. Aristotle also talked about the idea of Catharsis, which he described as “purification or purgation of the emotions” and said that Catharsis is the primary function of all the arts.

There’s a recent version of Relief Theory called Benign Violation Theory (BVT) developed by Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren. The idea is this: Say there’s something that threatens your sense of how things ought to be and it’s harmless (benign). You discover the threat and it’s harmlessness simultaneously, and the relief results in humour and even laughter.

The researchers talk about play-fighting or tickling, which wouldn’t be amusing if it were real fighting or if there was no threat (like tickling yourself). The phrase “comedy equals tragedy plus time” could well be describing the Benign Violation Theory of humour. Other violations are anything that feel “wrong” and can include social taboos, insults, deviations in behaviour, moral transgressions and even use of language.

Often when someone complains that a comic has “crossed the line” with a topic or tone that they consider offensive, the comedian’s reasoning is that violation is necessary for comedy – and the better the violation, the better the result. Offended audience members don’t have a working knowledge of comedy theory. They just know that a sacred cow of theirs has been violated and they’re even more offended when you suggest that the violation was benign.

Benign Violation is a pretty solid theory. It doesn’t quite explain everything, but it does account for a lot. It even accounts for “wordplay” humour because puns and malapropisms violate how we use language in a benign way.

There are other variants that fall under the banner of Relief Theory, the idea that comedy comes from building and releasing tension. Understanding the Relief Theory of humour is an enormous benefit to “storytelling” comedians, but it helps any comic with an interest in timing. Relief Theory doesn’t claim that all jokes need victims, but if the theory has a negative it’s that people can object to the tension. Not everyone enjoys being offended or feeling tension, and they don’t think the laugh is worth feeling violated for.

The golden rule for comedians is that a joke has to be funnier than it is offensive, and if it’s very offensive it has to be very, very funny. The juice has to be worth the squeeze.

Incongruity Theory.

Incongruity theory is about breaking patterns. The idea is that laughter comes when we’re confronted with something we don’t expect. Incongruity Theory is also based on our knowledge of how brains are designed and evolve.

The human mind is excellent at pattern recognition. It’s the algorithm we run the best, and it’s been important to our survival since prehistoric times. We look for things that don’t belong. We anticipate what something or someone is going to do. We’re trying to work out what comes next. We do it like our lives depends on it, because sometimes it does.

We look for patterns everywhere without even knowing we’re doing it. It’s the basis of how we solve every problem, and even how we get around without falling over. We can only see the front of a car but we know it’s got a back and an inside because our minds fill in the blanks between what we can see and what we know should be there. If our brains didn’t do pattern recognition the world would be a strange and impossible place.

There’s a few joke formats and formulas which we’ll be looking at later, but Incongruity Theory is the secret behind most of the common basic types of jokes. The “Misdirection” is a joke that’s built from a Set Up, where we create expectations in the audience’s mind, and a Punch Line that suprises the audience by deviating from the expectation they’ve created for themselves.

If you think about Puns, they’re the same thing. When we make a pun we’re creating a pattern with a sentence or story, and then we break the pattern by using words nobody expected (or used the words in different ways to what was expected).

There’s a whole style of humour called Absurdist comedy, or surrealist comedy. This style is all about being “random” and constanty surprising the audience with playful unexpected elements in our stories or sentences. Successful Absurdism thinks a lot about Incongruity Theory. Silliness for it’s own sake doesn’t work because there’s no expectation and therefore no suprise. The comedian still has to plant expectations in the audience’s mind before introducing something incongruous.

Something you’ll see comedians do a lot is the “rule of three” where they prove a point with three examples and the third one is unexpected because it breaks the pattern. Why three? Because three is the minimum number to establish a pattern. One is an isolated incident, and two is coincidence. Think of fairy tales and classic stories and you’ll see Three Little Pigs, or Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Three ghosts visiting Ebenezer Scrooge, and so on. We use the Rule of Three to teach stuff, so it’s a great pattern to break for humour.

With this format we have an example and a second example that reinforces the first one. Our brain is already expecting the third one to be consistent so the suprises is easy and effective.

It might sound like this: “My life philosophy comes from the great spiritual teachers: Jesus, Buddha and Kim Kardashian.”

As a young businessman I got this advice from a very funny CEO: “To be taken seriously in business you need a smart suit to look professional, grey hair to look mature, and hemorrhoids to look concerned.”

In a bit I did about the hardships of my (older) generation I said “We had to pay for our movies. We had to pay for our music. We had to pay for our porn.”

You get the idea.

Incongruity Theory is all about the element of suprise. The comedians who put a lot of thought into ‘timing’ of their delivery are thinking about Incongruity Theory and how to create surprise to make laughter.

Comedians love Incongruity Theory because it does a better job of explaining all types of jokes than the other theories, because it designs the main jokes structures, and because messing with people’s expectations is fun.

See what I did there?