The Hierarchy of Humor (from 2016)
incidentalcomics.com
The Hierarchy of Humor (from 2016)
Judd: When comedies work, they feel effortless, so I think people get no sense that it took so much more work than making CGI dragons fly. They don’t really give people credit for that.
Judd Apatow • Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
I recently did a talk in Brussels. I was talking about wit, and a man approached me afterward. He told me that considering all the Europeans there who spoke different languages, at least half of the people in the audience didn’t have a word for “wit” in their vocabulary. I discovered that they have “funny” and “humor,” but they don’t have “wit,” wh
... See moreDebbie Millman • Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits
I wonder if all jokes boil down to the same pattern that eventually gets layered and complexified by veteran comedians. A joke is made by creating a frame with an embedded assumption, and then using a punchline to break the frame and reveal an implied truth. There are two layers of subtext, the assumption (the undertone), and the post-punchline tru
... See moreHumor temporarily shuts down the commonsense program in your moist robot brain and boots the random idea generator.
Scott Adams • How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life
In order to experience comedic information as “funny,” the receiver first needs to recognize that the information has (or has had) the potential to be funny. In other words, the brain needs to know that it can file the data under comedy. This is not a labored process; it may take microseconds. Whether or not it is then enjoyed is a different matter
... See more