cheerfullyunfunny

I’m Not Drunk

This is a humor staple. The most common form is when the person in question attempts to convince someone else that he’s ok (mentally or physically) and so mangles the assurance that it is self-defeating.

Drunks are great at this. No matter how they phrases their denials, (“I’m not drunk, it’s just that people keep moving the floor on me”) , they fail to convince anyone.

Here’s a not-so-classic example, from Short Circuit 2:

[after the robot, Johnny Five, gets all torn apart by the bad guys]
Fred: Are you ok?
Johnny Five: Functioning 100%. Perfectly KO Derf.
Fred: It's Fred.
Johnny Five: That's what I said, Derf.

Homer Simpson has provided us with a wealth of these:

Oh, Lisa, you and your stories: Bart's a vampire, beer kills brain cells. Now let's go back to that... building...thingy... where our beds and TV... is.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.

Fast 90% of the Time

This comes from watching way too many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There are some films that not even the MST3000 people can make funny. The dialogue may be preposterous, the special effects execrable, and the plot full of holes, but the MST3000 people are often still unable to make the film funny if the pacing is just... too... slow.

If you want the audience to really get into the absurdity of the moment, you need to move fast enough to keep them from wandering. Most of life is way too normal to be uproarious. Comedy needs to move even faster than other forms of storytelling/movies to keep the audience interested.

Yes is Funnier than No

So the first rule of Improvisational Theater, according to Brad Miller, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer and avid Improv fan, is that "yes" is funnier than "no".

As such, one of the most basic warming up excercises for improv is called Yes, Let's:

Pick a group activity, like throwing a party or organizing a picnic. One player starts, saying "Let's ..." filling in what she wants to do. Then she starts actually doing what she said she wanted to do. A second player jumps in, saying "Let's ..." do something else, to advance the group activity. Both players say "Yes, let's do that" and start doing whatever suggested. Third player jumps in, suggests what to do, and again all players loudly agree to do it, and actually do it. Continue till everyone has suggested something.

The point of the exercise is to get players to reflexively accept offers. The reason this is a good thing is that a no answer stops all possible further action in a scene, whereas a yes answer provides many opportunities for taking a scene in a bizarre and amusing direction.

Laughing At You

Not With You

This will be entry #1 in the Great Principles section.

From The Onion AV Club interview with Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butthead, among other things:

part of the inspiration for both Beavis And Butt-Head and [a weird character from King of the Hill] was from my first engineering job. There was this guy who was a draftsman who thought that any time he worked the number 69 into something, it was automatically funny. He talked like Cheech Marin. He'd say stuff like, "Well, 69 percent of the time" or "Six to nine times out of 10," and he thought it was funny every single time. To me, that's funny, not because I think 69 is funny, but because that guy thinks that every time he says "69," it constitutes a joke.

There it is folks. The whole reason why Beavis and Butthead was a great show: it wasn't funny, it was funny that they thought it was funny.