I guess I’m sort of starting from first principles here, so I apologize if any of this is obvious.
I have this theory that humor is the game we play to practice the very basic and very vague skill of “understanding situations.” “Getting a joke” is the satisfying experience of figuring out what’s going on, ideally fairly quickly, and with a minimum of outside assistance.
Humor is contextual and subjective because the audience has to bring a certain amount of expertise to bear in order to “apprehend” something in a satisfying way. When people enjoy lewd jokes, they’re revelling in the shared understanding of lewd information; if you don’t feel somehow proud of this knowledge then you don’t find the joke very funny. Bertie Wooster says a lot of straightforwardly witty things, but he’s an especially funny character because I know people like him, so I’m able to infer things about him that he doesn’t reveal directly.
A more involved example: When Professor Frink silences an auditorium of rowdy scientists by yelling “Pi is exactly three!”, it’s not enough for us to know that pi is not exactly three. We have to understand how a crowd of scientists would react to such an outburst, and why Frink wants to create that reaction. We have to realize all of this very quickly, and then we laugh.
If we weren’t able to figure all that out in half a second or so, then when we see the scientists’ reaction, we have new information. Maybe now we can put together the whole situation, and then we can laugh. And maybe when Frink says “I’m sorry it had to come to that,” we’ve already figured everything out, and the additional information (the implication of Frink’s reasoning) is no longer helpful/funny. Or maybe we did need the extra help, and only now do we laugh!
Put another way, a joke is an opportunity for your audience to feel clever. If they understand how clever you’re being, that means that they’re just as clever! Or, roughly as clever.
And so I think being funny involves exercising a type of empathy, or at least a type of trust. I try to assume that the reader and I are on the same page. I can leave something unsaid, and you can infer what I’m getting at, and you’ll find it funny, because you got to prove to yourself that you know what I’m talking about. Or I can straightfacedly say something that’s obviously false, and you’ll realize that I can’t possibly be serious, and you’ll find it funny. (Here’s a very good video about chess algorithms.)
There are risks associated with this strategy. Sometimes you’ll say something strange, withholding information that you expect your audience to possess, so that your audience can resolve the strangeness in a flash of satisfying realization, but the information will have slipped your audience’s mind or something, and your audience will wonder: What the heck does this guy mean, “the socks I wore the other day?” That sounds like something a serial killer would say.
As we see in the Simpsons example above, mass-market stuff has a certain level of obligation to explain its jokes, taking some of the figuring-stuff-out work off the audience’s hands, because you have to appeal to a broad audience that includes people who are not as clever as you. And I think some people have learned from this style of writing that the structure of a joke is:
- An incongruous state of affairs arises
- Someone points out the way in which the state of affairs is incongruous
(Some of the best gags on 30 Rock are undercut in this way, but I guess it’s just as well that no specific examples are springing to mind.) If you don’t have to appeal to everyone, though, you can write jokes that are more satisfying/funnier, because they rely on more specific shared knowledge. And in particular you can craft material out of your personal experience and worldview.
This often manifests as stand-up monologues that essentially describe a personal worldview in exhaustive detail, but I think you can use this approach in other contexts—like when an idle thought crosses your mind that you would usually dismiss as too stupid to pursue. Instead, you can pursue it, and write it down, and let someone else notice how stupid it is, or notice that there’s a grain of truth in it, or remember having the same sort of stupid thought.
So maybe it’s a kind of super-trust, or reverse empathy: You can exercise the (kind of ridiculous) confidence that people will find something relatable in something that’s very specific to you. You can give them the chance to realize that they understand you, with the audacity to assume this will be a pleasant experience. And of course this sort of approach isn’t a hit with everyone, but I think when it hits, it hits hard.