Ken Levine posited on a recent podcast about why we laugh and why we don’t.
He talked about going to a Los Angeles-area theater to see a production of Peter Pan Goes Wrong. It’s a “comedy play by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields of the Mischief Theatre Company, creators of The Play That Goes Wrong (2012).”
Apparently, and I’ve never seen it, The Play That Goes Wrong is comedy gold. But he found Peter Pan to be a retread, humorous, but not nearly as side-splittingly funny.
Yet, he might see an old comedy bit that he had watched dozens of times, and it still cracks him up. Why is that?
I wrote to Ken with my working theory.
“For you, Peter Pan is not funny to you because of the lack of surprise.
“For me, it’s Airplane 2. It’s the same film as Airplane, except for the Art Fleming JEOPARDY bit, which is good. So it’s largely unfunny.
“Why is seeing the same bit again funny? Because you recall the surprise and you relive it. A prime example is Frasier: Niles ironing. That thing always slays me, partly because I was so surprised by that type of physical comedy in a more ‘cerebral’ comedy show. So when I see it again, it’s still funny because I relive the joy.
“Another of mine is The Germans bombed Pearl Harbor speech in Animal House.” {Language, BTW].”
Timing
As I think of it, most of the best bits require a build-up, or at least a pre-knowledge of the characters. Who’s On First lives on Lou Costello’s increased frustration with Bud Abbott’s explanation of the baseball players’ names.
In The Dick Van Dyke Show’s That’s My Boy, Rob and Jerry go through absurd testing before the punchline, which, when I was 10, truly cracked me up. (One could start at 18 minutes in and get the gist.)
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian always works for me. Incidentally, I never understood why some folks found the film anti-Christian since it was clear from the first scene that Brian was NOT Jesus.
But foreknowledge is not always required. I’ve cited Lou Grant’s initial interview with Mary Richards on the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. “I HATE spunk,” I wrote to a Wordle buddy, who used it trying to get to SKUNK.
My wife cited bits from The Carol Burnett Show: her Tarzan yell, the curtain dress (at 15:00), and Tim Conway as a dentist. She also noted Bob and Ray’s bit about slow speakers, the chocolate conveyor belt scene from I Love Lucy, and the Michigan J. Frog cartoon.
What comedy bits always make you laugh? And what comedy retreads left you cold?
The unaired (because there’s one rough word at the end) “elephant sketch” from a “Mama’s Family” bit on the Carol Burnett show (IYKYK). That one reliably makes me laugh.
Though often the things I find funniest are the dumb incongruous one-off things. Like that picture that circulates on the internet of a salad bar where the spinach is labeled “Spinch.” I can’t explain why things like that make me laugh, but they do.