I would have always said some of each, but maybe it’s neither.
I’m watching a show about comedians and they are all talking about a parent being funny.
But in my family, no parent was remotely funny, not even a smidgen. Whatever funny my mother was was purely accidental, same for my dad. They could both find humor in things and laugh (my dad particularly is a pretty easy audience) but they were never funny themselves.
Yet both of my sisters and I have always been funny, since childhood. Exceptionally so. (one of my sisters and I even did it professionally.)
And I cannot understand how that happened. Neither parent is funny and all three kids are? Huh?
There may be something to the “interrupted defense mechanism” theory of humor, in which case it is partly genetic. Every human culture and society has humor. It’s also a valuable tool for getting along as social animals. When you’re the Omega dog, seeing the whimsy in life is pretty much all you’ve got left.
Do other societies and cultures have the “one…two…gotcha!” structure we Westerners have in so many of our jokes? “Three is the magic number of humor.” Is that true in China, or Thailand, or among the Hopi or Ainu?
Maybe partly genetic, partly environment, and in some cases neither?
My great-aunt and I share a horrible gene/trait of finding ANYone (in real life) falling - including ourselves - hysterical…especially when they/we are grabbing at air to STOP the fall. My brother is hilarious…and the only person that make me consistently laugh, all the time. Most people who know me think I’m pretty funny and can be relied on to be the life of the party and to make everyone laugh.
But, then I’ve also heard that most of the very successful comedians/comediennes had horrible childhoods…and that many have attributed their successful sense-of-funny TO those horrors while growing up, as a defense mechanism against it.
That would suggest it’s more environmental, than genetics.
The rest of my family has no sense of comedy whatsoever. Senses of humor, yes–comedy, no. It’s not just lacking a comic turn of phrase; they have no timing that I can detect. You could hand them a full routine of good material, and they’d still flop, because they can’t deliver it. On the other hand, I manage the occasional bit that reduces people to helpless laughter. I’m not even an amateur comedian, but I can deliver funny material reasonably well, and I can identify experiences that will translate into funny stuff (usually bad things that have happened to me in the past).
So…where did it come from? It’s not like I was taught timing or phrasing. I’ve probably honed it somewhat over the years, but it wasn’t something I practiced prior to the first mock-rant that left one of my friends sitting on the floor, wheezing. I didn’t learn it in childhood, because I wasn’t around funny people as a kid, and didn’t really try to make people laugh myself until I was an adult. (Not that my upbringing was humorless, but the humor was almost entirely in written form, as we were all fanatic readers.)
My guess is that there’s some measure of native talent involved, not unlike musical talent (and perhaps not unrelated, as both have a rhythm element), and it can be developed both through exposure and practice. I didn’t really start watching/listening to comedians until college; that exposure probably started the development of my own sense of timing.