By A. J. Henry
Parody, lampoon, satire, burlesque, pastiche, take-off, spoof, skit, sendup and ‘Yo momma so fat’ routines are just a few of the words we have to poke fun of each other. And as long as it’s funny, it don’t matter, or does it? Here is a ‘light-hearted’ look at what makes something funny and why we laugh.
Why do we laugh in the first place?
Laughter was first taken seriously by a French doctor back in the eighteen-hundreds. Guillaume Benjamine Amand Duchenne de Boulogne was a neurologist tinkering with the nervous system. With a name like that he must have caused many nervous, tittering introductions. We’ll call him Benny for convenience. Benny was a serious doctor who discovered the benefits of biopsy. He was at the same time nutty.
So what has this got to do with laughter? Well, the good doctor carried a box with him. Clamps attached electrodes to a volunteer’s face. The box was as we would know today a mini facial taser and the jolt of electricity made people grin. It must have been a hoot around Benny’s breakfast table, “Hey, kids, a funny thing happened at the surgery.” Buzzzzzzzzzzz!
What Benny discovered was that humans use a variety of smiles and laughter.
Fast forward a hundred or so years later and a couple of dudes named Gervais and Wilson expanded Benny’s research into laughter and put it on a timeline. Around four million years ago, give or take a few million, the first humans laughed. I mean, really laughed.
While Benny could make people grin with a jolt of electricity, he could never get a real laugh (and there’s no surprises there.) True laughs use mouth muscles called the zygomatic major and eye muscles called orbiculares oculi. 
This kind of chuckling is called after one of Benny’s names, the Duchenne smile. Remember that when taken your next selfie. Instead of “Cheese” say “Duchenne”.
Our fur-covered knuckle-dragging ancestors didn’t have much to say to each other because their vocabulary was limited to like zero. They relied on grunts and gesticulations. A rustle in nearby shrubbery signalled something was afoot, a Sabre Toothed Tiger for instance. For early mankind, danger lurked everywhere. When the rustle was one of their own jumping out from the bush, tension was released in the form of laughter. It sent a message that there was no threat. The victim of the practical joke realised they’ve been had and also laughed. Pretty soon, others watching this pair of goons joined in the merriment.
Comedy fulfils a need humans have to be social animals. Straying from societies norms is called ‘benign violations’. What makes us laugh has many theories.
The Theory of Reduced Tension.
Yep, just as the name says, we laugh because we let go nervous tension. One theory supported by Sigmund Freud was put forward by English philosopher, Herbert Spencer. His idea was that energy is built-up by false expectations. It goes someway to explain why getting turned down for a dance at the school prom is hilarious… even though it’s not funny at all.
Superiority Theory.
This one goes back to Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle says (in a roundabout way) we laugh at a homeless drunk struggling to pick up a cigarette butt from the pavement because we feel superior to him—unless you are that drunk who in turn is laughing at his friend whose head is jammed in a trash can which makes him superior to his frined–and you get the picture.
Incongruous Juxtaposition Theory.
This one is a favourite shtick for many comedians. It means that we are told of a situation and expect it to be so, only to find out it is something else. Philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up comedy by saying, “The sudden transformation of a strained situation into nothing.”
It goes someway to explain why when on holiday I caught a fish in my swimming trunks. Why it was swimming in my trunks is anybody’s guess?
We’ve got an idea of why we laugh, but what about those who make us laugh?
What has Paul McCullough, Ray Cameron (Michael McIntyre’s father), Michael Roof, Doodles Weaver, Drake Sather, Micke Dubois, Max Linder, Simon Bent, Andrew Koenig, Ray Combes, Toney Hancock, Freddie Prinz, and Robin Williams got in common? You guessed it; they were all funny. They also committed suicide which is no laughing matter.
Next Act: The Dark Side of Humour.
Sigmund Freud in 1905 quipped, “Humour was the fun-loving id making itself known despite protestations of the conformist superego.” If you’re chortling into a bowl of cereal over that one, your are alone. On the other hand when Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte was on the hustings to garner supporters he tried his hand at comedy. He joked about a girl who was mob raped noting she was so beautiful the town’s mayor should have been given first privilege—no one laughed. It was not funny because it violated normal social behaviour.
While it is true, humour confronts life’s shadowy side, it must fit with ‘benign violations’.
Does this mean that because the stand-up gagster sees the dark side of life, it brings he or she down? It appears this may be the case. 
In an eight-part series on CNN called The History of Comedy, it examines the impact of telling jokes and the tie-in between depression and drugs.
One episode entitled Sparks of Madness looks at issues facing the people who make us laugh. It reveals many are themselves troubled. Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt, who won a Grammy Award for best comedy album, said, “A lot of comedians are people that are very introverted, very shy, very sensitive to humiliation… a little narcissistic, a little damaged.”
Psychologist Daniela Hugelshofer put forward the idea that joking acts as a buffer against hopelessness and depression.
In order for a subject to be funny, it must violate (in the nicest way) the every day. Something normal becomes unsettling and threatening. When Australian comic Carl Barron joked about his childhood, he quotes his father repeating an oft said threat to an unruly child, “Do you want a smack?” Barron highlights the absurdity of the question by mimicking his younger self answering, “Oh, yes. I’d love one!”
Another aspect of standing on stage in the glare of spotlights sees the comedian in the control of a situation in which they would otherwise be one of the crowd. A nobody.
A 1975 study of fifty five funny persons found they were fairly intelligent with higher than average gifts of the gab. It also found a huge eighty percent of them sought therapy.
ajhenryblog 