A long time ago I read a book about “Terror Movies” which I’m assuming, because I borrowed it from my high school library, isn’t available anymore. It was about what we know as Horror Movies but it made a distinction between “Horror” and “Terror.”

Terror, they argued, is what we feel about an impending threat. It’s based in fear and is the basic driver for what a think of as horror movies. Horror, they said, was our feelings about something that’s either already happening or in the process of happening; something like a disaster, accident, or the aftermath of carnage. It’s based more in revulsion than fear, and we should really be calling films designed to scare us “Terror Movies.”

I mostly agree with this idea, with the caveat that in the decades since the book came out there’s been a focus in the genre to employ revulsion and horror instead of suspense and terror.

Of course when I write these posts it’s inevitable at some point that a reader will ask “OK, but WTF does this have to do with Comedy?” I can hear a lot of you doing that right now, and that’s OK because I’m about to put you out of your misery.

Almost all of the recognized structures for joke writing rely on a plot twist that relies on the element of surprise. Misdirects, the basic foundational structure of jokes, especially emphasize that the plot twist is the punchline, but it’s the surprise that sells the plot twist and makes it work. If we can’t pull off surprise our joke won’t work, no matter how clever the plot twist is.

There are tricks we do to make our surprise element effective. We ensure that the axial moment of the joke, the word or sound that triggers the funny, is as close to the end as possible. We employ word economy, but we’re also carefully choosing how we say our joke to most effectively implant false assumptions and the do a quick reveal. People mean all kinds of things when they refer to “comic timing” but the velocity and timing of how we trigger the shift from set-up to punch-line is the most salient sense in which we talk about timing.

We’re careful and selective about what we show and, just as importantly, what we don’t show. If you re-hear or reflect on a joke you heard you’ll realize that the assumptions which got smashed were only made because we were a little deceptive about the information we revealed to you. We use every trick in our utility belts to make sure that the punchline is a surprise.

But there’s another type of joke… the one where surprise isn’t as important. With some jokes we can see everything being set up and we kind of know how it’s all going to be knocked over. It’s the kind of joke where we figure it out as we go, and we know exactly where it’s going.

Believe it or not, those are satisfying too. It’s satisfying for an audience to work it out and still enjoy how it all plays out. When that happens, the audience member feels clever for knowing what’s going on, and they feel included… almost like they’re a co-conspirator in what you’re assembling. They know the destination and they’re still coming along for the ride.

I once heard a comic describe this process as being like sex. The orgasm, he told me, isn’t a surprise. We know it’s coming, or at least we hope it is, and we know what an orgasm is like. But knowing this doesn’t detract from the experience which, to stretch the analogy even further, is still a pleasant release.

The word release here is no accident. Surprise jokes and anticipation jokes both still Release/Relief Theory. The idea that that the laughter comes from building tension and then releasing it works for both formats.

The main difference is that when we rely on the element of surprise we’re doing it as a form of Benign Violation Theory, where the violation and the reveal that the violation is actually benign happen almost simultaneously, and the shock realization of these two ideas at once creates a rapid build and release of tension. The other way, the one where the audience can see the car crash coming, is more of a gradual build and release… like slowly inflating a balloon before letting it go.

The best example of how this works is to re-watch old episodes of Fawlty Towers, the sitcom helmed by John Cleese and Connie Booth in the 1970s. I think it’s fair to say that even at the time these came out, we could see it all coming together long before it did. We watched Basil Fawlty and all his interlocutors build an absurd Jenga tower of events, and we’d grin wildly knowing how it was all going to furiously fall apart at the end of the episode. Foreshadowing didn’t detract from the enjoyment, and that’s why the episodes are still great to watch even though we’ve seen them before.

Obviously, we still have to be mindful of our timing when we deploy this kind of humour. Whatever style of joke we’re doing, it still sucks when an audience member shouts our punchlines or finishes our jokes before we do. For this reason, pacing and a good feel for the room and the crowd are essential.

The element of surprise is always going to be the cornerstone of our material, but sometimes when we write it might be worthwhile asking how necessary the surprise twist is to this joke. It might be worthwhile to go the other way, especially if the plot twist was going to be tricky to pull off anyway.