joke analysis

P

Papercut

cut to the bone
i've never been able to figure out where i stand on this.


is a joke funny only if stands up to analysis?
 
M

massrock

Well-known member
One of its legs are both the same.

I don't know - is this some kind of accepted theory of joke construction? It doesn't seem true to me, for a start funny is whatever you find funny. And what does 'stand up to analysis' mean? Stand up in what way? What kind of analysis?

OK, maybe I see where you're coming from. There should presumably be some way to describe how the funny in a joke operates. If there was a joke that was funny for a good percentage of people but nobody could explain why, that would be interesting, I suppose.

There are different kinds of funny of course.
 
Last edited:
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
this is, i suppose, the line of thinking that many surrealist comics have tried to undercut - that you must know what's going on/recognise it at some level, to find something funny.
 
M

massrock

Well-known member
Confounding expectations is one of the primary mechanisms of jokes, so that's not too difficult to explain or analyse is it?
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Jokes are doubtless constrained by the limitations of human short-term memory, just as sentences and songs' riffs have a maximal length, beyond which they no longer seem coherent to the audience. Formal complexity, in other words.

Jokes that involve paradoxes, recursion etc could be said to be complex, but they refer to complexity rather than perform it.
 
swears

swears

preppy-kei
We need a dialectical materialist analysis of late capitalist humour. Everything else is just so much bourgeois waffle.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
of course, over-analysis is likely to suck the humour out of the joke, like over-familiarity does.

I think Frank Carson said it best tbh :D
 
P

Papercut

cut to the bone
Benny B said:
of course, over-analysis is likely to suck the humour out of the joke, like over-familiarity does.
Click to expand...

yes, i agree.

it was just something an exgirlfriend said to me years and years ago that kind of stuck in my head, which was "if a jokes funny it should stand up to analysis" (to paraphrase)

but then i don't know if i ever agreed with it. if i'm honest this whole thing was just a way to round up a few counter arguments in one place so i could leave her a meandering, bitter voicemail some night and close by blowing what she said out of the water.
 
P

Papercut

cut to the bone
Benny B said:
of course, over-analysis is likely to suck the humour out of the joke, like over-familiarity does.
Click to expand...

yes, i agree.

it was just something an exgirlfriend said to me years and years ago that kind of stuck in my head, which was "if a jokes funny it should stand up to analysis" (to paraphrase)

but then i don't know if i ever agreed with it. if i'm honest this whole thing was just a way to round up a few counter arguments in one place so i could leave her a meandering, bitter voicemail some night and close by blowing what she said out of the water.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Sometimes over-explanation is the joke though. Like in a lot of old Lee & Herring routines: "You see, what you're done there is confuse [some concept] with [some other concept]...". See also: the somewhat overused phrase "...for comic effect".

I do love the humour of defeated expectation, too. Blackadder is great for this, especially given its well-known tendency towards overblown, contrived simile: "The grave opens up before me like a...big hole in the ground."
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Mr. Tea said:
Sometimes over-explanation is the joke though. Like in a lot of old Lee & Herring routines: "You see, what you're done there is confuse [some concept] with [some other concept]...". See also: the somewhat overused phrase "...for comic effect".

I do love the humour of defeated expectation, too. Blackadder is great for this, especially given its well-known tendency towards overblown, contrived simile: "The grave opens up before me like a...big hole in the ground."
Click to expand...

bathos!
 
P

petergunn

plywood violin
<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value=""></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>
 
hucks

hucks

Your Message Here
I find analysis of humour really interesting. Listening to Seinfeld and Larry David talk about what made an episode of Seinfeld funny makes it pretty clear that humour is suitable for analysis. I quite like the idea that you could craft a joke that would utterly cynically and exploitatively make people laugh. What an utter bastard thing to do ;)
 
grizzleb

grizzleb

Well-known member
Yeah, I think all jokes have a point at which they are funny. It's usually a moment where you would expect something, but that expectation is confounded. I think pretty much all jokes work like this.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
hucks said:
I find analysis of humour really interesting. Listening to Seinfeld and Larry David talk about what made an episode of Seinfeld funny makes it pretty clear that humour is suitable for analysis. I quite like the idea that you could craft a joke that would utterly cynically and exploitatively make people laugh. What an utter bastard thing to do ;)
Click to expand...

Now this must be some sort of weird cognitive dissonance on my part, because while I think Curb is one of the funniest things I've ever seen I find Seinfeld utterly abominable. I mean, like worse than Friends. :eek:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top