What Is A Joke?

Okay I've set this up as a link to part 2 of the article 'What Is A Joke'? Feel free to add your thoughts about types of joke I may have missed...

https://www.comedy.co.uk/make_it/what_is_a_joke_pt_2/

I gather it's up now...

boo I was expecting read an invigorating article on Nigel Farrage!

Article's good though.

Wow. My article must have been perfect.Thanks everyone!

I'm not sure whether this counts or is relevant to your article, but I remember the American cartoonist Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) had his own theory of writing jokes and humour which he called his "Two of Six Rule".

Adams claimed that all comedy could be broken down into six basic groups and if you combine any two of these groups you get something that is funny. These groups are:

* Clever
* Cute
* Bizarre
* Cruel
* Naughty
* Recognizable

You mention some of these in your article, but I wondered if there was anything else that you could find useful. This was taken from this blog post by Adams, but if I remember rightly this was more fully detailed in his book The Joy of Work.

He also clamed you could control the future by writing things down, so may not be a reliable source. Laughing out loud

This is mainly for Dave Cohen. There was a talk at the conference about visual comedy and Julian Dutton, creator of Pompidou (which will start in January) came up with seven rules for visual comedy. These were:

1) Sudden appearances
2) Humans behaving like objects
3) Objects behaving like other objects
4) Misunderstanding
5) Separate realities
6) Repetition
7) Collision of ideas

Thanks Ian. When we're writing our genius works, we often forget how much TV is a visual medium. I hope those who attended the conference (and that session) got loads out of it.