What’s So Funny?
June 6th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Each of us has our own unique sense of humor. Things that I find funny, you may find stupid or unsophisticated — and vice-versa.
Really successful comics are usually those who find a way to be funny to the biggest, most diverse group of people.
Some try to accomplish that by appealing to our intellect and sense of irony. George Carlin comes to mind.
Others try to do it by pointing out funny things in our everyday lives. Like Jerry Seinfeld or Bill Cosby.
Or by getting us to use our imaginations, like Bob Newhart.
Still others surprise us with weird personas, like Bobcat Goldthwaite.
Or diverse and interesting characters, like Whoopi Goldberg and Lili Tomlin.
Or an apparent talent for improvisation, like Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters — though I’ve seen the former “ad-lib” the exact same lines on more than one late-night television talk show.
It seems to me that, over time, audiences’ sense of humor should evolve into being more sophisticated, the same way that many 5-year-olds find non sequitur “knock-knock” jokes to be really funny, while very few 10-year-olds do.
But instead, I see an unfortunate devolving trend in comedy personified by so many of today’s popular comics, who get their laughs by shocking their audiences with lewdness, grossness, obscenity and misogyny. I personally think that that those types of humor are really low-brow, and I don’t think that it takes much talent for comics to perform them.
But millions of their fans disagree with me.
Now, scientists say that laughter has been around for a long, long time.
That makes me wonder what type of humor made people laugh 16 million years ago.
I have a feeling that is was something like this.
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Entertainment, Funny, Science