Animals wearin’ clothes. They think they’re people!
Black guy is really cool. He must partner up with a straight laced boring white guy in order to accomplish something or another. Black guy listens to cool music. White guy doesn’t. Black guy looks cool driving a car. White guy doesn’t, because he drives too slow and obeys strict traffic regulations. At the end, they learn quite a bit about each other, and become friends. Extra funny if black guy teaches white guy how to dance!
Multisyllabic puns. ("It’s the Preacher from the Black Legume!")
Seeing someone “breaking the fourth wall,” ie: interrupting a sketch to talk to the audience or just kidding the premise of the sketch.
Jokes involving numbers. (No, I’m not a math geek. I can barely add 2 + 2.)
Seeing people attacked by small, ordinarily tame animals. That Citibank ad with the magician and the killer rabbit? I died.
The type of gag where an extreme reaction that would usually be frowned upon is acceptable in the current circumstances, but one of the characters is unaware that the situation is any different from normal. This happens a lot on the Simpsons, for example in the halloween special where zombies plague the town:
Zombie Flanders: Howdy neighbor, I’m feeling a might peckish…
Homer: repeatedly shoots Zombie Flanders with his shotgun
Bart: Wow dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!
Homer: He was a zombie?
And from Futurama with Farnsworth’s mysterious box that Fry and Bender keep trying to get:
Hermes: Here Leela, use this gun to shoot those guys.
Leela: Right, if they try and get the box.
Hermes: …yeah, whatever.
Person A describes something in explicit detail to person B, who is disturbed/shocked/overjoyed/horrified, because he/she thinks the entire conversation is about a different subject (the comments make sense (albeit very different sense) in both contexts.
And the kind of visual stuff Peter Sellers was so good at in the character of Clouseau; he gets in a bit of a fix, then every attempt he makes to extricate himself only makes things progressively worse.
Other jokes have heart, but football in the groin has a football in the groin.
“Get out of the car and…”
<everyone>
“…cut off your Slauson!”
Human bones. Always cracks me up—especially if they’re animate skeletons or skulls.
Oh, hell yeah. An Mr. Ed talking. It’s a talking horse!
I like a male character, especially one who is “macho”, reacting in a very exaggerated womanly way, for instance holding his hands up flapping and letting out a high pitched scream of terror.
Any good impression of Bill Cosby, William Shatner or Christopher Walken.
Any Jesus joke for some reason. Homers dancing Jesus website, or the Jewish robots in Futurama just kill me.
“You guys don’t believe in Robot Jesus?”
“We believe that he was built and that he was very well programmed, but he is not our Messiah”
I can’t believe I forgot this before: screeching cats. Any time somebody tosses something away in a movie and you hear a cat yeowl, it’s gold. It works equally well in real life or when you’re heckling a movie. There’s a great example of this in Young Frankenstein.
Anything coming from offscreen and hitting someone in the face or head.
See Night Shift, where Michael Keaton asks Henry Winkler for the keys to the hearse.
Well, no wonder. Everyone knows that everything’s better with monkeys.
Please forgive a me-too post:
I came in here to point out this device, but to my surprise was beaten to it. This is not overused, which makes it all the better when it’s executed. I generally don’t find allegedly comedic violence particularly funny, but always crack up at escalating violence in the background while it’s going unnoticed by characters peacefully trying to resolve the relevant issue in the foreground.
I always laugh when people run into things unexpectedly. Like when the guy is following a bus or train, the girl looks out the window, then BAM, a pole. The impact seems harder because the train and camera keep moving.
There was a Bud Light commercial that did this perfectly. She holds up a sign that says “pole”, and while he’s trying to figure it out, BAM!
Always funny laugh-out-loud moments? People getting run over by trucks, trains, or anything else going very fast, filling out the screen completely – picture Road Runner cartoons with the Coyote standing before a tunnel he’s just painted on the rocks. In fact, it’s SO funny that I habitually picture it happening. Grandma’s waving to you from behind the door? Picture her run over by a milk truck - instant comedy.
I take this to mean you’ll be writing in Samuel L. Jackson & Eugene Levy for a 2005 People’s Choice Award.
I’ll nominate any Three Stooges-like ‘violence’: Eye pokes, ear-pulls, head shots, smacks or assaults with a monkey wrench.
The object or non-verbal creature that won’t cooperate. The baby that won’t stop crying, for instance, or the door that won’t stay closed, causing the main character to go to ridiculous lengths to try to master it.
My favorite example of this was a one-off Warner Brothers cartoon about a squirrel with a nut that wouldn’t crack. While still in the forest, the squirrel tried more and more extreme methods of cracking the nut; I’m sure an anvil was involved at some point. When none of that worked, he took the nut to New York City (all in a day’s work for a squirrel, right?) and stubbornly pushed it up all 102 flights of the Empire State Building. Finally having reached the observation deck, the exhausted squirrel pushed the nut over the edge. Wheeeeeeeeee…
Cartoon physics prevented terminal velocity, and the nut hit the street with the speed and force of an express train. A large section of pavement was indented, cars flew up in the air, but the nut was still intact.
So the squirrel gave up and placed the nut on a vendor cart, where it teetered on the edge for a moment, fell to the sidewalk, and gently cr-r-r-a-a-c-c-k-ed up the middle, and the squirrel fell over backwards.