What Makes Comedy Funny?

[Dean_M]

I've enjoyed the recent discussion about comedy in relation to competition choruses and quartets on the barbershop yahoo discussion group and offshoots on various forums. I'm not even going to begin to touch on the competition scene and scoring since I don't even pretend to know all the intricacies of judging.

One thing I do know is that some excellent comedic elements can push raise the entertainment value in the eyes of your audience take your 'score' in their eyes from just an average performance to one they rave to their friends about.

One of my recent quartets sang at a 60's level (just above the 'Kiwanis cutoff') but was able to create raving fans and community groups would have us back year after year because our Bass was just a naturally funny guy, had a good sense of timing and the rest of us would find ways to play off that and integrate our own comedic elements into the performance. This happened to be an existing quartet that I was invited to join so my first performance with them was quite an eye opener, my first time being on stage and seeing the audience reaction to humor, falling in love with it and trying to analyze ever since that time - what makes something funny...

Alternatively, we've all been in the audience of a performance where they try to integrate comedy that just doesn't work at all. It is a most painful experience and can soon make you wish for less as opposed to wanting to see more.

So what is it that makes something funny? Do you have to be born funny or is it something that can be learned? Unfortunately, I don't think it is a science that you can prescribe a formula and crank out comedy at will. It's also quite subjective (you either love the 3 stooges or hate them) but there are certain common elements that we can identify.

One comedic element that everyone seems to relate to is taking the obvious and drilling into it to point out and exaggerate the minutia so that we see every individual element and recognize what we can't see from the 'big picture' perspective. Seinfeld is a genius at doing this - like looking at the individual frames of a film and seeing the humor in each of the still pictures - he takes the 'film of our lives' and points out the goofy expressions or gestures in the individual slices.

Here's a classic video of FRED doing the same thing in a quartet performance. There are a number of comedic elements at work here but I love the dichotomy of deadpan faces singing 'I'm so excited', exaggerated slow motion hand raise and the play off 'I've got rhythm' that's one frame off - in rhythm but out of sync.

There's enough in here you'll want to watch it several times to identify them all.



What do you think? What are some ways you've used slice of life humor in a performance to create a comedic element? What makes something funny?

[GHG_nut]

Been a long time - I had forgotten this discussion forum was even here.

Like the new format and the blog posts...

As for comedy - I think most people are either born with it or not. I don't think it's something I could learn.

As for FRED and the video posted? The Groucho masks while singing 'I've got a great big smile on my face...' was priceless.

One thing that's often talked about as performers is the importance of engaging the audience. Watching FRED or Metropolis or one of my up and coming favorites Lunch Break just seems to engage me as an audience member. I'm easily able to look past little performance flaws and make me part of their world.