What Makes Comedy Funny?

A woman's child dies. Tragic? Almost definitely.

A guy slips and falls down. Funny?

That depends on your entire life history.

Comedy Is Context

Drama tends to appeal to the human audience's broader sense of justice, of right and wrong, of tragedy vs. exultation. Deep down, we can say with certainty whether something is a positive or negative event. And, by and large, the bulk of humanity agrees with the typical evaluations: war, sickness and death are (usually) bad, and love, marriage and success are (usually) good.

Meanwhile, comedy appeals to a different part of the human condition: the intellect. In comedy, we don't require an emotional response for the laughs to be effective. Instead, we need a disconnect between the expected action and the actual action. That's the rift that causes surprise, which leads to amusement / hilarity.

But that rift is dependent upon what YOU expected to happen, and what YOU expected might not be what I expected to happen. That's because we all approach new information from different previous experiences, which determine whether something is confusing, surprising or offensive -- to US.

It also explains why one person might find the Three Stooges hilarious and someone else might find them unbearably idiotic.

What You Ate for Breakfast Determines Your Sense of Humor

Everything you've ever done, seen, heard or experienced influences your worldview today. The less you've done, the more easily you're surprised, and therefore the more likely you are to find something funny: your frame of reference is small enough that EVERYTHING is new / strange / different.

Thus, even if you don't laugh WITH someone, you're well-prepared to laugh AT someone (because they're different, and laughter is a safe form of self-defense.)

Meanwhile, if your life is more cosmopolitan -- if you have a wider basis of experience to draw from -- then you're less likely to be surprised by simple humor. You see the jokes coming. What 90% of the public finds surprising is second nature to you.

Congratulations: you're the kind of audience Hollywood hates.

YOU appreciate jokes that require lengthy set-ups and payoffs.

YOU enjoy witty turns of phrase and intellectual acrobatics.

YOU understand conflicts across multiple layers of characterization.

In short, you're an audience that requires more work from a storyteller in order to be surprised. This means you're in a rarefied niche. And you're incredibly hard to reach, because there are fewer artists with the tools necessary to surprise you.

This is why black comedies, satires and dialogue-driven comedies are in such short supply: their audiences are, by nature, much smaller. This means they're more work to make AND they're less-profitable.

And, meanwhile, the Scary Movie franchise keeps on chugging...