What is it we’re laughing at when we laugh at a joke? What is it that makes it an enjoyable experience?
Here’s a couple of my favourite comedy moments, a one-liner from Bob Monkhouse and a stand-up routine from Jim Davidson:
When I die I hope I go the way my old dad went, peacefully in his sleep and not screaming like his passengers.
This old dear came on to me once but I told her I wasn’t interested. ‘Oh that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘How about a bit of mother-and-daughter action?’ ‘Ah well that’s different,’ I said. ‘Oh good,’ she said. (Cupping his hand to his mouth and shouting upwards at an imaginary ceiling) ‘Mother!’
In each case the joke works by setting up an expectation in the audience’s mind and then subverting that expectation. But it doesn’t do the subverting explicitly, it leaves the audience to supply the connection on their own. Thus:
Oh I get it. His dad didn’t die quietly in bed at home, he was driving a bus or taxi and fell asleep at the wheel.
Or: Oh I get it. She didn’t mean herself and her daughter, she meant herself and her mum.
What we’re laughing at when we laugh at jokes, what gives us pleasure, is a heightened sense of our own creativity, our own cleverness in making the necessary connection that completes the comedic circuit, almost as if we’d come up with the joke ourselves or were collaborating in its conception.
It’s worth noting too that both these jokes adhere to another classic rule of gag-writing: deliver the crucial expectation-confounding word — the word that detonates the joke — as late as possible, ideally as the very last word. Here the detonators are ‘passengers’ and ‘Mother!’ After all, you don’t want the audience drowning out the end of your joke with their laughter.
This also explains why jokes are never funny when they’re explained, because explaining the joke deprives us of the pleasure generated by our own sense of collaboration.
