There’s been books, university courses and I’m such also TV shows about humor: what makes us laugh and why. I think the answer is very complicated and depends on personal characteristics as well as the individual’s experience and mood.

There is one thing that I respect in humor, especially humor in storytelling, which I think is a fairly universal quality, and that is the “arc” structure of stories: the idea that humor builds on itself by–almost in a fractal manner–having a larger story composed of many thematically-similar smaller stories.

This structure is usually evident when you listen to stand-up comedians. Their stories feature plenty of puns and one-liners. But they are stories–they are composed of threads. Each thread builds up to a funny conclusion, and each thread contains many puns and one-liners. We can go further–several such stories create a set up for a really funny pun at the very end that connects (in an arc-like fashion) many threads. There can be more levels, but, understandably, it gets more and more difficult.

It you look around, some of the best humor is organized in this very way. Seinfeld (or, more purely, Curb your Enthusiasm), for example, follows this recipe: the final pun is usually built up over the duration of the episode, with individual threads which by themselves are funny. Chris Rock’s Kill the Messenger is by far my favorite show that has this property as well. While most humor has two such arc “levels”, good stories use three, or more, levels. The real challenge is to operate within the arc structure while not seeming artificial. The most talented comedians will make the connection between the arcs so seamlessly that the theme only becomes apparent as the comedian is about to offer his or her pun.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 14:43 and is filed under art, reductions, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.