What's so Funny?

Comedy is pretty much the only film/TV genre that is universally loved. It's a pretty broad genre, from Coupling on the BBC to How I Met Your Mother on CBS to The Hangover to Puss in Boots and everything in between which makes it appeal to any audience. I'm a huge fan of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson which is 42 minutes of a middle-aged Scottish dude making fun of people (himself most of all) and making himself laugh. It's effectively unscripted humor that somehow makes it better; I have a theory as to why his comedic stylings are so much greater than the better-known CBS talk show host David Letterman. One word: punchlines; more specifically Craig rarely has them while Letterman exhales them like CO2.


Think about how comedy has evolved over the decades. Shows like I Love Lucy and I Dream of Genie were family-friendly, punchline-riddled, and rife with physical comedy. Notice how in shows like these there is a pause after each joke to give the audience time to laugh before they moved on to something else. As the years passed physical comedy became less and less prevalent which made the genre very hit or miss. This is due to the fact that someone tripping on a banana peel and injuring themselves is funny but when your comedy purely relies on the words spoken, people can fail to get it or simply fail to find it funny. Comedy then became stratified into different types: raunchy, dark, family-friendly, stand-up, romantic. The list goes on, but you get the idea. Recently, stars like Amanda Bynes, Robert Downey Jr., and Shia LaBeouf have all used physical comedy (to different degrees) in their films. It's like physical comedy just needed to lie dormant for long enough for people to think it was funny again. As physical comedy has begun its rise to prominence once again, punchlines have started to die out. Think of your recent favorite comedic movie. The Hangover is an easy example because anyone sane at least thought it was funny. There's quite a bit of physical comedy, but less of the "joke then pause" dynamic involved in punchline-riddled comedy.

To get to my point (and I apologize for any flow issues in this article; it was written over a period of about a month), this new type of comedy is making the genre funnier than ever. You don't need a laugh track or badamchhhh (I'm not good with spelling sounds) to tell you when you should find something funny. Either it is, it isn't, or you don't get it. This means writers and actors have to be more talented in order to sell their joke, which brings up the quality of the show as a whole. There are plenty of people, myself included, who liked the old SNL. The "Not Ready for Prime-Time Players" are still some of the best comedic actors around (Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, for example) while the newer cast rely on an older comedic paradigm that is much less funny than the stand-up at the beginning of the show. Be honest, how many of you have just watched the intro and then tuned out for the rest of the show? I sure have. The new SNL is really no better than MadTV, which is really sad.

What it all comes down to is reality. Real-life is really funny when you think about it, but rarely are those funny things intentional. I was talking with friends recently about the 6+ pumpkin pies I had made for Thanksgiving, and then continued to tell them "I don't even like pumpkin pie". It was something that was funny as hell, but wasn't a joke. Real comedy is what happens when you don't expect it, and that element of surprise, that act of discovery is what makes great comedy feel real and natural. Those moments where you can't describe why something is funny, but laugh harder when you try are the most valuable in life, and the writers and actors who manage to capture that essence are among the greatest in the industry.