First thing I'm going to warn you about is that when you start learning comedy theory you will start appreciating jokes less as your head becomes programmed to look out for the punch line rather than enjoy it. Programs like the big bang theory and two and a half men will lose all of their humour (because you look for the joke and there isn’t one just canned laughter). Like frogs, comedy dies when dissected.
Now there is no formula for how to write a joke, there are however formula’s that help discern if a joke is funny. I'm going to be touching on a few in this blog at some point but until then you should know humour comes from the release of tension, where in a joke the last few words will alter your perception of the current situation causing a release in tension and people to laugh. Normally a joke will explain a situation and due to a well known cliché that viewpoint will be taken allowing the joke to take another route. For example here’s a joke from Mel Brooks.
“When I was your age, my parents used to rock me to sleep. The rocks were as big as your head.”
The first sentence is used as the “set up” where it sets up the situation that everyone is familiar with parents rocking a baby to sleep in a crib, however he takes rock in a literal term this change of situation causes humour. Allot of jokes can be put into this category, and if you look at some jokes you can pull apart the "set up" and the "reveal".
Next time I’ll probably do a blog about observational humour, then maybe i'll write a blog about writing jokes.
