LIT 344 / COMEDY & SATIRE NOTES
SUPERIORITY & THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

Connie Weiss, in What Makes Comedy Funny And Can We Write Humor, Too? writes:

    Steve Allen, in his book, How to Be Funny, quotes first Aristotle as stating that now familiar idea that the pleasure we derive in laughing is an enjoyment of the misfortune of others, due to a momentary feeling of superiority. Cicero too said that the ridiculous rested on a certain meanness and deformity and that a joke had to be at someone else's expense, though Allen adds that Cicero acknowledged that "the funniest jokes are simply those in which we expect to hear one thing and then hear another." That element of surprise is what makes 'Elephant Jokes' (now enjoying a resurgence) funny.
      "Why does an elephant have wrinkled feet?"
      "From lacing his sneakers too tight."
Steve Martin defines comedy as "the art of making people laugh without making them puke."

So what is comedy then? Dr. Ed Rivers, an instructor at Cumberland University, explains it this way.

    "In the most common literary application, a comedy is a work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest, to involve, and amuse us: the characters and their difficulties engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern. We are made to feel confident that no great disaster will occur, and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. The term "comedy" is customarily applied only to plays for the stage or to motion pictures; it should be noted, however, that the comic form, so defined, also occurs in prose fiction and narrative poetry."
Two elements which seem to occur in most comedy are 'superiority' and 'surprise.' The former refers to the notion that the audience often feels superior to whomever the comedy is direct toward. And this is intentional. The second refers to the reaction people have to hearing or seeing something unexpected. Very often, they laugh.

I worked with a comedy troupe called Esther's Follies for a number of years as a lead writer and occasional performer. (I'd much rather watch someone perform my work than to do it myself.) One of the group did a routine where he was introduced as Sister Ruth (a reference to Sister Ruth Pemberton, a pentacostal preacher from the 1920's). The routine was quite popular and it intrigued me to see that audiences who had seen the routine before began to participate in it. They actually came back to see it, even though they knew all of the jokes. So surprise is not an essential element. In fact, if we truly enjoy something, if it makes us laugh, we may listen to it or watch it over and over and get just as much pleasure from it.

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