Why do we laugh? It’s a helluva question. Two recent books look at that issue from interesting angles.
In The Humor Code, Peter McGraw and Joel Warner go on a wide-ranging, globe-trotting adventure to see what makes things funny. Their work centers on the benign violation theory, which basically means that things are funny when they violate some sense of normalcy or decency, but the violation occurs in a context that makes it OK. This book discusses as astounding variety of humor from around the world, and the authors make a stong case.
In Comedy Writing For Late-Night TV, Joe Toplyn—former head writer of The Late Show with David Letterman and a multiple Emmy winner for writing—provides one of the most practical guides to comedy writing ever written, drawing on his extensive experience. If you want to write for late-night TV or any related comedy genre, this is the book for you. For Toplyn, the main element of humor is surprise, though he also cited superiority as a primary reason for laughter. We laugh at what we don’t expect, and we laugh at things that make us feel better about ourselves.
Toplyn recently debated McGraw and Warner, and it was pretty damn interesting to see people who have given more thought to laughter than 99.9999% of the population talk about my favorite subject.
As for the comedic common denominator—the Holy Grail of humor scholars, if you will—I have to side with Louis CK who doubts there’s any one theory that can cover every funny thing, much less every joke. In McSweeney’s, I recently looked at Louis and Mitch Hedberg, and while surprise and benign violation could explain a lot of their jokes, I noticed something even more powerful: an enlightenment of sorts.
In the case of Hedberg, his jokes can make you see everyday details in a new way. In particular, his escalator joke contains the observation that an escalator can never really be broken, it can only be "temporarily stairs." As Hedberg gleefully says, this should result in a sign saying "Sorry for the convenience." What I love about this joke is how it takes an everyday circumstance—a broken escalator—and makes you look at it in a fresh way, turning annoyance into amusement.
Louis, on the other hand, has the ability to take you so far into his own head that you end up deep in your own: for example, Louis describes a conversation with an annoying neighbor that paints Louis as a witty hero, only to reveal the whole conversation was a fantasy. It stunned me to see the lame, mean, horrible processes of my own mind portrayed on stage.
I guess both those examples could easily fit under the old chestnut, “It’s funny because it’s true,” but that seems inadequate. I guess “It’s funny because it changed the way I look at the world” doesn’t quite have a ring to it.