Similarly to Nick’s professor, Isaac Asimov argued that all humor comes from a sudden shift in point of view–something happens that requires the situation to be seen in a different way. The simplest example of this is the anticlimax, as in a shaggy-dog story.
I would agree more with Asimov than Nick’s professor. 
Not all comedy is joke-based, in having necessarily a set up and punchline (I mean, look at Douglas Adams…), but the more I think about it, the more I agree that every form of comedy, including the ones I listed, are based on that sudden shift. Parody and satire are obviously that. So’s misdirection and exaggeration. Absurdity is a natural. A play on words is a meta-sort of shift in point of view.
But… the humour that stems from repetition, and from “reproach”… to fit those in would require an argument that borders on artificiality. While it’s “clever” to reduce all humour to a formula, it might not be exact and will lose all sense of what humour is (honk if you know what this one is about: “The definition of a human is a featherless biped.” “Ah, so a plucked chicken is human.” Retold by Poe, and attributed by him to, I think, Aristotle).
I feel more comfortable in reducing all humour to a handful of formulas, because that way we don’t lose soul of humour, but rather gain some insight into it. It’s like Stephen King arguing there’s only four or five forms of horror, represented by the Ghost (supernatural), the vampire (mythological), the werewolf (partly human) and the zombie/Frankenstein (undead), and possibly maybe also the alien (something completely alien to us). Of course, this excludes a more realistic and terrifying sort of horror, the one people do to themselves and others, but I think King was talking very specifically about the horror he mostly deals with.
I understand that “talking about comedy” thing, but only agree to a point. There are definitly a few formulas, there are some bases, it’s definitely an art and a craft, and good comedy sometimes (often?) has to be rewritten many, many times (I understand John Cleese in particular slaved over his sketches like nobody’s business). So it’s a good thing to talk about it and dissect it, understand why it works the way it does. As long as we understand that there’s definitely an element to it you can’t trap in a discussion, any more than you can replace a live concert with a recording.
Cite sources? Where did he make this argument?
The closest I’ve ever heard of is this taxonomy, which is not very much like the one Peter described.
You could argue that horror and comedy are close cousins. Douglas Adams wrote about a universe in which humanity was a small, unimportant speck. Our species is destroyed by larger, more significant cosmic forces. HP Lovecraft spent much of his career writing on a similar premise.
Danse Macabre, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t state it exactly this way, and I’m also pretty sure he didn’t mean for it to reduce horror to these forms; I am paraphrasing from memory and from my interpretation of what I read, and making it more dogmatic than he intended to be.
So I guess the source should be “Stephen King in Danse Macabre as reinterpreted freely by Peter Pears”, which lacks a certain something.
EDIT - Oh wow, how memory and interpretation turn things on their heads. I just hunted for the relevant passages in Danse Macabre… and I guess I ended up putting words in King’s mouth (which he certainly doesn’t need). He was just speaking about three archetypal types of horror in literature and movies.
Put it down to the sort of thing that happens when you read a book that stimulates your imagination in creative and analytical ways both; over the years what he said grew to mean, to me, pretty much what I’d attributed to him. But looking back, it’s definitely not what he said; it’s how I read it, first at the time, and then over the course of ten years, re-surfacing when I personally analysed some horror film or book.
I still think it’s kinda right, though.
EDIT 2 - Not quite what dfabulich quoted, though. Here’s the bit from Wikipedia that made me go “Whoops!” in a big way:
So, erm… yeah… very little resemblance to what I originally said.
Thanks for checking that. Didn’t mean to embarrass you - it’s just, I read a LOT of Stephen King, and that didn’t ring right to me.
Anyway, back to comedy!
I completely agree with you. Humor and horror are very close cousins. It’s all in the intent and execution.
Upon very rare occasion, I lose my sense of humor around 3 AM. It happens when I should be asleep and I’m still reading despite my exhaustion, and suddenly that’s exactly what I see - that what should be muted down by humor, is secretly starkly horrifying.
I distinctly remember this experience with both Terry Pratchett’s Jingo and Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall and Other Stories. It kept me from reading Jingo again for several years, but it was more disconcerting with the Asimov, because I practically knew the book by heart. (Seriously, not a scary book. Full of weird situations and Asimovian humor.)
But it goes the other way, too. When csandel and I were writing One Eye Open together, I asked her to read Stephen King’s “1308” as background material because it scared the crap out of me.
She read it. She agreed it was scary. And then she put me in stitches with a dramatic, boiled-down version of the plot -
“I am going to stay in the scary hotel room.”
“I am the owner of the hotel and you should not stay in the scary hotel room.”
“I am a writer and I am going to write about the scary hotel room so I am going to stay there.”
“You should not stay in the scary hotel room because many people have died there. I am the hotel owner and I know this thing.”
“Nothing is going to happen to me. I am a famous writer and I am going to write about the scary hotel room.”
…etc, etc. (May not work in written form, but if you’ve read the short story, you get the idea. For maximum effect, imagine that both voices sound basically like Dug from Pixar’s Up.)
She was right! It was funny. And the story lost a lot of power to scare me. Once she saw the humor past the horror, she could guide me through to see the humor in it as well. (This experience is directly related to the over-the-top dark/gore humor in OEO, which worked really well for some people and turned others off completely.)
FWIW, the ending of Hamlet can be hilarious if done badly.
Oh gosh darn, the queen drank the poison. Now she’s dead.
Hey, look, now it’s Laertes. And Claudius. And Hamlet. Man, they’re dropping like flies. It’s like, who’s going to die next? Taking bets!
Some lines and situations (and, specifically, high-quality british shows) live on a deliciously thin line between humour and deadly seriousness. I mean, “I, Claudius” and “Rome” alone (and no, the thematic similarity isn’t lost on me) are both stocked to the brim with situations that are so bizarre, and so serious, as to be ridiculously funny, but not something you’ll laugh out loud at. We keep talking about “absurdity” making comedy… it must be right, because most horror - as cvaneseltine brilliantly demonstrated - is a tiny step away from being hilarious.
It’s one of the things I admire most about quality works, and the British with their dry wit seem to have honed it to perfection. Hey, we keep referencing Douglas Adams, and we already talked about Pratchett… Gaiman’s sure to follow…
EDIT - Re “Jingo”: Pratchett often does that. Few of his books are actually light reading matter, despite appearences (and those appearences are wearing thin; “Raising Steam”, continuing a tradition more or less started by “Fifth Elephant” in Vimes’ stories, doesn’t much bother to hide bigotry, racism and power-thirst behind comedy, like "Jingo). “Small Gods” remains an all-time favourite of mine…
EDIT 2 - Watching a Chaplin short, I was suddently reminded: Slapstick is a form of comedy as well. And even one that’s used, under the broader reference of “allusion”, in “Nord and Bert” (the sitcom scenario).
EDIT 3 - A small aside: watching these old Keystones flicks I am reminded of nothing but those old console RPGs where it looked like every action was initiated by an attack. Want to attack an enemy? Hit the attack button. Want to chop a tree? Hit the attack button. Want to tell the princess to follow you home? Hit the attack button. Want to sleep? Chop that bed to shreds. I get the same feeling watching these old flicks - if you want to get something done, you have to punch the person next to you.
Maybe cynically, it strikes me that in some ways we may not have evolved as much as we’d hoped from these early days of cinema. Ah well.
In fairness to my professor, I think what he meant is actually closer to what Asimov said than my clumsy rendering might have made it seem. It’s not that all humour is reducible to a literal setup and punchline, but that all humour has: a) the seemingly normal situation, and b) the surprise that disrupts it. I actually think repetition-based humour is completely in line with that: the first few repetitions are the setup (i.e. you don’t necessarily expect that something funny is actually coming from the repetition), and at some point you’re in punchline territory (the repetition has become funny). If humour’s understood in this way, I think most humour actually is reducible to jokes.
I’m not sure if I agree; I actually think there’s something to the simple conception of humour-as-surprise that allows for a lot of variation and seems to capture something true about what humour is. Breaking it down into a further, more rigidly specific taxonomy is what seems to take the soul of humour for me, the same way it’s one thing to try to pin down some essential characteristic of your favourite music but another to relentlessly break it down into a set of techniques (both are probably valuable, but I feel like something important gets left out if the former is focused on exclusively).
If I remember correctly, it’s actually Diogenes the Cynic who’s supposed to have made the “plucked chicken” comment, and the version I’m familiar with, at least, sounds very much like a joke: at the Academy in Athens, they teach that the definition of the human being is a featherless biped. So Diogenes shows up at the Academy, tosses a plucked chicken into the middle of the room, and says, “Here’s your human being.” Badum-bum!
(That’s my second favourite Diogenes story. My favourite is the one where Alexander the Great goes to Diogenes, greets him and asks him if there’s anything he can do for him, and Diogenes says, "Yes, get out of my light.)
Humor can also come from familiarity and recognition. Example is the dragons in How To Train… With their occasional cat-like behavior cleaning themselves or chasing a thrown staff unexpectedly as a puppy would.
One trick I like with surprising juxtapositions is that, if your idea isn’t working, reverse it. Like, if you find you can’t sing Killer in the Home to the tune of the Go, Diego Go! theme, try singing the Go, Diego Go! theme to the tune of Killer in the Home! It works much better.
About Hamlet, I think you can practically hear Shakespeare saying “Oh crap! I forgot to kill Gertrude off!”
“If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny.” -Lester (from Crimes & Misdemeanors)
There are really two topics here: the inner workings of humor, and how to use humor in games.
First, humor works best (in my view) when 1) there is some tension but 2) there is no actual pain. Humans are naturally story-seeking creatures so the tension of build-up, of expectations, of social norms, of “correct” behavior, enable us to anticipate what we think will happen next. As an example, behold the carpenter carefully lining up his last nail; he is balancing his hammer carefully in his palm, reading his last strike to drive the nail. We anticipate the expected result (he drives the nail) and we might also anticipate the humorous sidestep (he smashes his thumb). He raises back the hammer vigorously and the head flies off. Boom, punchline: the unexpected happened.
Now with an IF game, you have given the player a simulated world and have asked him to suspend disbelief. You give the player commands and ask the player to use them, with the unspoken promise that the expected will happen. TAKE SWORD leads to taking the sword; ATTACK TROLL leads to battle, possibly adding (with the glowing Elvish sword) to disambiguate the command. It’s hard to directly use humor because it can break the unspoken covenant that commands have expected results and simulated objects behave in foreseeable (if unorthodox) ways.
You can have humor more easily by having characters who simply are funny; but I venture to say that unexpected results for comedy’s sake are pretty hard to pull off in IF. Hence the emphasis on sarcasm or insult; it subverts the expected by failing to be helpful and polite. It is a reversal, of sorts.
Have you played Hitchhiker’s Guide? The babel fish puzzle comes to mind here.
I have, yes. It is one of the few examples I can think of where it successfully subverts the player’s commands without being too annoying (ymmv). It also does the “go south / You don’t want to go south” bit.
This is what makes Nemean Lion so wicked awesome.
Am I the only person who remembers the opening scenes of Fine Tuned?
I’ve done a lot of work on this in several drafts of the game I’m working on, and I want to share a discovery. When you’re trying to write comedy, IF has an unusual blessing: timing. Timing, as they say, is everything. In TADS 3 it’s easy to segment a setup/build-up/punchline into turns 1 2 and 3 with daemons, or with Scenes in adv3Lite.
Will the game be funny? Who knows. Like most games, if it succeeds it will be because of a niche audience. But I’m learning a lot about writing, humorous and otherwise, trying to make it work.
God I love the Monkey Island series. One thing that stands out is how much respect for the player that game had. I remember where you spend lots of time traversing a map and you have to go back and forth to complete some task, finally getting a boat to row to an inaccessible point of an island. At the exact point I went “oh god I have to row back” the game put up a title card saying “After some more furious paddling…” and just put me where I needed to go. I stood up and cheered.
I also love that they had no problem letting you run something into the ground with variable text (something we’ve lost mostly with voice acting) such as the “Pretty please” joke. You ask for a bucket. The pirate says no. The choice changes to “May I please have the bucket?” and you can ask again. Every time the choice gets wilder “May I pretty please have the bucket” “May I pretty please have the bucket with a cherry on top and sprinkles and chocolate syrup and…” Tim Schaefer sort of did this again with the cereal choice in Broken Age. I love it so much that I almost always try to put one ever-changing description in every game I write…either just a tremendously long string of responses, or something that self-describes randomly.
(I never got the actual humor of “ELAINE!!!” until years later.
Another humor method I loved and try to crib often from Lucasarts is overdescription. Guybrush has an entire adventure in a secret passage behind the wall that is only described in sound and text and adventure choices he makes automatically for you. I wrote a vending machine once with a half-page description detailing the elaborate mechanism involved to move the chips you bought five inches from the window to the dispensing slot, ultimately mangling your snack to the point of unrecognition. I thought it was funny. 
HHG: “That thing your Aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is.”
Understatement and hyperbole can be funny if done correctly.
“You can see a mixing bowl, an unopened letter, and the entire Nation of Arusthroika here.”
“>PUT NATION IN POCKET”
“Um. Okay. Done.”
“You open the ice machine, revealing 46,357,672 ice cubes.”
“>TAKE ICE CUBE”
“Taken.”
“You can see an open ice machine, containing 46,357,671 ice cubes.”