What Makes A Joke Funny?

Mind The Gap For Laughs

In the spirit of this being a blog written by comedy writers, I thought I’d spend today’s post sharing some of my thoughts on what makes things funny; in specific, the mechanics of a joke.

Now, I don’t mean a knock-knock type joke, per se, but anything that makes you laugh. I am especially talking about laughs you get from sketch comedy, like Saturday Night live, or BrevityTV.com, for example (which is hilariously funny, of course. Maybe even more so than anything else in the universe).

Most humor turns on a gap. That gap can be a difference between audience expectations and reality, like if a character walks in on another man having sex with his wife and instead of getting mad he says “Thank God, now I can watch TV tonight”. It could be a communication gap, such as a script of ours called “Sandwich Shop”, where a frustrated customer cannot get a shop clerk to understand his order.

The Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch also employs the communication gap, but mainly the gap in it is the difference between convincing someone a parrot is dead versus alive. Clearly this is a gap of character viewpoint.

Other common gaps include fish-out-of-water (when Borat visits America we get a cultural gap), personality gap (in “Lost In The Desert” we see what happens when you strand an optimist and pessimist together in the desert), gender role gap (in “Fantasies”, we don;t expect the female to be more sexual than the male).

In fact, there are an infinite number of gaps that can be used. It’s limited only by your imagination. Part of the key is beginning to recognise them in your writing. It also helps if you learn which types of gaps you like to write most often. Some people simply find communication gaps hilarious, so tend to use that a lot in their writing.

So, if you want to write funny, like we do, mind the gap.