Has anyone ever taken the humor writing course from MediaBistro? (http://www.mediabistro.com/cou.....rs3329.asp)

It seems like a lot of money for essentially an online critique group with a weekly chat, but if I heard some good feedback about it, I might consider it.

Good luck with the new site Fair!

Have you read the book from the scientists at LaughLab? They studied what humour is from the perspective of neuroscience, and had to find funny jokes to do their experiments. How they gathered those jokes is almost as interesting as the results! They nicely summarize what people around the world find funny, and not funny, based on actual scientific measurements and observations. Check it out on Amazon.com or Google for further details.

One model that I developed and have been working with lately with great success is a two-step process for making people laugh.

Step 1: Create a setting/circumstance that is enveloping. Based on my own experiments with humour, I can see how your 2 of 6 rule would work great for this. This can often be done with just one line at the beginning: A sailor walks into a bar with a brightly-colored parrot on his shoulder. The bartender says, “Wow, where’d you get that?” And the parrot says, “The Navy. There’s lots of them.”

Step 2: Do a “flip”, where you surprise the listener/reader. According to Paul Ekman (book: Emotions Revealed), surprise is typically followed by fear. For example, you’re walking through the forest and a bear jumps out to get you. First you’re surprised, then fearful (and probably running for your life). But if what follows isn’t fear, then we get a sense of relief that makes us laugh: You’re walking through the forest, a bear jumps out to eat you, so you slap his nose and make him sit.

In the parrot joke, the surprise is a parrot that owns a person. The thought of being owned like a pet is frightenning for most people and it’s a relief when the ownership is of the sailor and not you. It’s also wonderfully ironic and makes use of personification, in keeping with the cleverness factor emphasized by Fiar.

It seems that the flip needs to take place in the “gap” between our emotional and rational responses, which is why timing is so important and yet has so many variations. The process causes the amygdala (a very dense part of the brain) to prepare the body to deal with challenges to the safety of the listener (whether real or imagined, emotional or physical), followed by a release of built-up natural tension about 1/10 of a second later when the prefrontal cortex recognizes that there is no impending danger, threat, or deprivation.

I have no idea why cute things are sometimes funny, unless they bite.

I’m really glad you’ve opened the discussion on this topic, and I’ve added you to my aggregator. Keep up the good work!

RT, that’s still nothing compared to the gutwrenching belly laugh I get the 17,002nd time.

Lucy Dee, thanks for coming by. I hope to see more of you around. I’d really like to know more about your experiences as a stand up. I’ve never been much of an “In front of crowds” type person.

ABAN, Your name’s too long. It’s an acronym now. Like I was mentioning to Chris, there’s definitely an amount that there needs to be a natural ability. I have a natural inclination toward sarcasm myself. For people not offended by it, it has a natural humor element to it. If you go by the 2 0f 6, you’ve got “Cruel” covered with the sarcasm, which is ridicule. Of course, you don’t want to be dull, so you just naturally ramp up the “Clever.” There’s 2 of 6. Add a little more to it, and it might even be really funny.