My favorite humor items and why
Humor is unique in that there can be zero requirements to be a part of, or there can be such an intricate setup that not many people will see the payoff. My first example is one that I think benefits from context, but isn’t necessary. The video here is a great video because it’s short and sweet. If you’ve never heard the song from Two Door Cinema Club, it’s still funny but it benefits so much from the expectation that has been created from listening to the song. So, you have the buildup in the video, that then subverts your expectations because it stops the song completely and puts the humor in the slaps happening. The timing of the video is absolutely perfect. Even the name of the video (slap) is so simple but represents perfectly what the video is about. This is a perfect example of the incongruity theory because it subverts what the viewer is expecting. If you’ve never heard the song before and don’t know what to expect, then it could also be seen as the relief theory because it is just funny and lets out the stress.
The image below is also one of my favorites. This, to me, is not laugh outloud humor. It’s something that you can just chuckle at. It is a satire on the perspectives of comics and subverts the ideas that comic readers have. While we are always expecting to read the text from all sides and expecting the characters to do the same, the characters being on opposite sides highlights how absurd it is to expect them to see the text from different planes. but it also makes us question the role of the speech box. We assume that the speech boxes represent what it sounds like for people to speak. However, the comic below takes those speech bubbles and makes them physical entities in the comic. This comic is also, an example of the incongruity theory. Maybe I’m just a fan of things that stick to the incongruity theory!
People might not like humor that fits into the incongruity theory because it goes against their expectations and some people are looking for humor to release pressure and stress. Overall though, I think these are just funny :)
