How to be funny

Anything can be funny, no matter how offensive. The trick is, it has to be funnier than it is offensive. You get positive points for funny, you get negative points for offensive. If your net result is >0, you're funny. In theory, you can say something that's -10^100 offensive, and it will work if and only if it's +(10^100)+1 funny. This is why Sarah Silverman tends to work for me.

The thing most people don't realize is the audience gets to delegate these points however they like. The comedian doesn't get any say in it (which is why people who insist that they're funny even when the audience doesn't agree come across as mad crazy assholic). If the audience finds it more offensive than it is funny, the comedian loses.

I had this big long explanation about how to calculate whether something is going to be offensive to the audience, but I just realized it comes down to one simple thing: if the audience identifies with the victim of the joke, and they feel like the comedian is a threat to them - like the comedian wants to hurt them and then laugh at them for it.

So if a comedian wants to tell a joke with an offensive element to it and wants to maximize the chances of the audience finding it funny, what they have to do is disarm themselves and/or empower the audience until they get to the point where even if they audience identifies with the victim, the comedian is so powerless ineffective that they couldn't actually hurt the victim. Again, I think this is why Sarah Silverman works - her character is such an ineffective person that she couldn't successfully act on her offensive impulses even if she tried. (I can't think of an example offhand, but I have seen comedians go too far with this, casting themselves as the victim in a that I can identify with, and leaving me uncomfortable because now I feel like the whole world wants to hurt me and laugh at me for it.)

As usual, Eddie Izzard is very good at this. In his Heimlich Manoeuvre bit, he takes a joke just up to the point where he's about to pose a threat to the audience, then promptly disarms himself, all in about 30 seconds.

The part I'm talking about starts at 2:00:



Watch from 2:00 to 2:22, then pause just after he says "Your hymen's been removed?... You need it removed?"

Now if this joke were being worked out for the first time, the obvious next step would be for him to thrust his groin or something. But that would ruin everything. The audience would be sitting there, imagining themselves choking to death in a restaurant, and suddenly someone comes up and starts trying to have sex with them. That's not fun at all!

Now press play and watch how Eddie gets himself out of this one.

First he mimes surgical equipment - pretend surgical equipment that doesn't exist in reality. So now whatever this idiot has in mind, at least he isn't going to try to stick his dick in you while you're choking to death. Then he says "I don't know how to remove a hymen." BOOM, threat eliminated. He doesn't even know to stick his dick in places, so he's no threat at all! In fact, since the audience does know how to remove a hymen, he's put us in the position of power. We can now feel slightly superior in any number of ways, ranging from "Good, let's keep it that way," to "Come on, we don't believe that for a minute," to "Why don't you come here and I'll show you?" That's got just about everyone in the audience covered.

The net effect isn't hugely funny, but it does end up with positive points because he was able to make his little "Heimlich manoeuvre sounds like hymen removal" joke while not making anyone in the audience feel like he wants to rape us while we're choking to death or would think it's funny if someone raped us while choking to death. And all because he's willing to swallow his ego enough to pretend for a moment that he doesn't know how to have sex.