i.e., someone usually has to get hurt for something to be funny. Does anyone know the source of this
Does anyone know the source of this quotation? Or did I just imagine it? ISTR some old vaudevillean saying it … but maybe it was all just some fever dream.
Never heard of it, nor did google!
Maybe it was on ‘Dream River’ wherever that is.
I’ve heard it many times (Heinlein talks about it, for instance, in Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And it’s in a lot of my college lit books on humor), but I don’t buy it.
Wordplay (puns, etc.) doesn’t require anyone to get hurt, nor does the “grace” that made up a lot of the physical humor in Buster Keaton’s silent films. Nor do “tall tales” and many other jokes of exagerration (and shock) that build in humor the longer they go on.
That isn’t to say that there isn’t humor in someone (apparently, and these days, clearly not really) getting hurt, as when Charlie Chaplin acts like an automaton and repeatedly hits a pursuing policeman on the head. But even here, the humor isn’t that the policeman is getting hit – it’s that Chaplin’s character continues to do it and get away with it.
The football into the crotch and running smack into a glass door are always the big laugh getters on “funniest home video” shows.
But then I don’t watch them for that reason.
Humor always invoves a surprise, but as Jack Benny proved every week, that can be done just by failing to react.
Sounds like something that could be a line from a movie about theater or stage or comedy writers. Or perhaps about a slapstick team like the Three Stooges. Their booking agent had lines similar to that.
I’ve merged duplicate threads here, if you think things look funny.
samclem GQ moderator
As opposed to them looking nice? 
I haven’t heard that exact quote, but Mel Brooks has a line: “If I stub my toe, that’s tragedy. If you get hit by a bus, THAT’S comedy!”
Well in terms of nice guys finish last (and nice guys don’t get laid), nice can equal boring or dull, which the opposite could be funny.
Puns hurt the listener. That’s why I like them.
That’s true. That kind of nice means “inoffensive,” and something (expectations, manners, whatever) has to be offended for things to become funny.
I don’t think ALL humor has to involve injury to others, but a lot of it does. Hence “pratfalls”, “butt of the joke” and America’s sub[/sub]Funniest Videos.