Skip the Theory

In my opinion a little bit of theory never hurt anybody. But as several people have pointed out to me, what follows is a tiny bit more than a little bit of theory.

My goal was to give you an overview of all the Humor Theories, explain my idea of why and how jokes work and show you that I based the joke formula on the thoughts of people that are much smarter than me.

But if you are anything like me when I started out, you probably want to begin writing right now. And you can absolutely do that by skipping ahead to “How to write a Joke”.

Just know that I do recommend going back to all the theory. In order to make people laugh or write comedy you don’t need to understand why humans laugh, how a joke works or even think that you are capable to make someone guffaw.

But it helps.

And the same goes for Humor Theory. You don’t need it in order to write comedy. But it helps.

Well… Sometimes.

Most Humor Theories (at least on the surface) are completely useless when it comes to the actual “how” of writing comedy.

For example the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in the year 1900 that the fundamental source of comic is “the presence of inflexibility and rigidness of life”.

Now that’s helpful, right? Go on. Just be inflexible and rigid in life and you will see the funny will flow!

The thing is: Humor Theories aren’t here to instruct us on the “how” of writing comedy. They are ways of thinking about humor, approximations of why there is humor and how humor is happening. They don’t offer us a recipe on how to actually write a joke.

Humor Theories are like driving theory: You learn all the road signs and what to do when the signal is red but you won’t be able to actually drive a car.

Accordingly Humor Theories give us hints on how to approach the writing of a joke and we will try to base our “how” on them.