# What is Comedy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 10, 2004, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947 "2004-09-10T19:44:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mailman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8491ac/32.png) [@mailman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mailman)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 7:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/1 "2004-09-10T19:44:00Z")
Why do I laugh at some stuff, and not others? How come I sit stone-faced through the same movie that makes some other people laugh uproriously? Conversely, why do I crack up at things that other people find only mildly amusing, or not funny at all? What the hell is comedy? Why do we laugh? Is comedy, as I have heard, always at someone else’s expense? ---
**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/2 "2004-09-10T19:59:29Z")
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” - Mel Brooks ---
**Author:** ![mailman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8491ac/32.png) [@mailman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mailman)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/3 "2004-09-10T20:13:14Z")
> [@pravnik](#): > > “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” - Mel Brooks See, that’s funny. But does it depend on if I am the “I” or the “you”? ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/4 "2004-09-10T20:26:02Z")
I always liked James Thurber’s definition of humor (which I know isn’t the same thing as comedy): “_Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility._” In other words, we can laugh at the guy slipping on the banana peel, because we’re sitting comfortably on a couch. I think also that what we’ve experienced from birth plays a big role in what we laugh at, but it’s so it’s buried so deeply that we don’t understand why we laugh at what we do. ---
**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/5 "2004-09-10T21:07:39Z")
Aristotle said that comedy depicts people as worse than they are, and comedy better. Tragedy lets us pity the sufferings of the noble, and comedy to laugh at the sufferings of either fools and cowards, or at tricksters who subvert the social order, all without suffering any ourselves. Freud said in _Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious_ that humor “provides infantile gratification by disrupting the adult world” and is often a means of unconscious sexual release. Big surprise there. It was all about the penis with that guy, wunnit? ---
**Author:** ![pravnik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8edcca/32.png) [@pravnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pravnik)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/6 "2004-09-10T21:11:52Z")
Err…make that “Aristotle said that comedy depicts people as worse than they are, and _tragedy_ better.” Tpyos are teh funny. ---
**Author:** ![TJdude825](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dec6dc/32.png) [@TJdude825](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TJdude825)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/7 "2004-09-10T23:30:05Z")
I remember reading in Scientific American some months ago about how there are two different parts of the brain involved in humor. One part “gets” the joke (for example, notices that was has just been said is a pun, or double entendre, or whatever it may be) and another part thinks that it’s funny. IIRC, the funny-meter can sometimes trigger slightly before the get-it-meter. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/8 "2004-09-10T23:56:08Z")
If you buy [THIS BOOK](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/037540340X/qid=1094860413/sr=12-1/104-2879222-5695927?v=glance&s=books) you shall gain a deeper understanding of comedy than anything we could say here. It is not merely a novel, but Eric Idle’s Theory of Funny, and is a very important book, IMHO. ---
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2004, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/9 "2004-09-10T23:57:44Z")
In reference to the above post– > [@](#): > > What makes humans bark? > Is the funny bone funny? > What is the algebra of comedy? > Did the sitcom originate with the ape? ---
**Author:** ![quothz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/da6949/32.png) [@quothz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/quothz)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/10 "2004-09-11T13:06:09Z")
> [@mailman](#): > > Why do I laugh at some stuff, and not others? How come I sit stone-faced through the same movie that makes some other people laugh uproriously? Conversely, why do I crack up at things that other people find only mildly amusing, or not funny at all? What the hell is comedy? Why do we laugh? Is comedy, as I have heard, always at someone else’s expense? I don’t have any citations, nor am I an expert on psychology. However, I’m given to understand that the phenomenon responsible is called ‘cognitive dissonance’ (cognative dissonance seems to be responsible for several behavior patterns). The idea is, when you experience humor, your brain makes a loose association between the setup and the punchline, recognizing that one relates to the other. Meanwhile, another part of your brain (logic or language, presumably) attempts to make a literal, sensable connection between the two, but cannot. The resulting neurological mess makes you laugh and find it funny, if the joke was any good. If not, either you never made the setup-punchline association or your logic center (or whatever) is still grinding away. So I gather it’s a sort-of mental defense mechanism, evolved to reconcile situations in which logical associations just don’t apply. ---
**Author:** ![mailman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8491ac/32.png) [@mailman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mailman)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/11 "2004-09-11T15:23:19Z")
> [@pravnik](#): > > “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” - Mel Brooks I am going to go back to this one, which is a great illustration of the conundrum. If “I” cut my finger, it’s tragedy, while your death is comedy; it’s the I-versus-you thing. How come something which happens to another poor fool can be funny, when it wouldn’t be if it were happening to you? But, sometimes your own misery is hilarious in retrospect. The flat tire you had in the on the interstate in the rain, stranding you in the vehicle with your mother-in-law…the time your canoe dumped and you lost everything while camping…? It’s a funny story when you tell it later on, but were you laughing at the time? ---
**Author:** ![Sattua](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sattua/32/11906_2.png) [@Sattua](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sattua)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/12 "2004-09-11T15:24:50Z")
I have attended the conference of the International Society for Humor Studies the last two years. There is the aggression theory of humor, that laughter is actually delight in our superiority to someone or something. There is the script opposition theory of humor, that we laugh when two incompatible things are put together. Whether you actually laugh at something that is technically funny depends on your mood, your social surroundings, your culture (whether you are capable of getting the joke), and your values (we cannot laugh at things we take seriously–no bin Laden jokes for the al Qaeda). I don’t remember the others; the aggression camp is rather small. At ISHS, the battle is between the script oppositionists and the people who are not convinced there is any one explanation of humor. If you really want to get into the literature, look for titles by Eliot Oring, John Morreal, Victor Raskin, Salvatore Attardo, Christie Davies, and Willibald Ruch–there are many more regular attendees, but these are the old-timers. ---
**Author:** ![Lakai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/9de0a6/32.png) [@Lakai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lakai)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2004, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-comedy/263947/13 "2004-09-11T16:20:32Z")
IIRC, you laugh when the oppisite of what you expect happens and I guess if that event does not make you feel bad.