You know the one where the dog stops at a telegraph office and dictates a message to the operator? He barks out nine woofs. The operators tells the dog he can send one more woof for the same price. The dog looks at him and says, “But that would make absolutely no sense.”
That’s probably not the funniest joke in the world, it’s just one I came across when I was doing a little more research on Dr. Richard Wiseman and his quest to find the world’s funniest joke (scientifically speaking).
The New Yorker article explores the possibility that there is more science to comedy than people acknowledge; that much of humor, and especially what makes people laugh, can be analyzed, dissected, and explained in a scientific manner, much like what we’ve been discussing in CTPR 499- the notion that we can analyze and break down the elements of comedy to not only understand what makes something funny, but also use these principles to create new comedy.
I personally believe that these principles can be enormously helpful to aspiring comics & writers, though I don’t know if I can fully embrace the idea of comedy as a mathematical, empirically explicable science just yet… what do you think?
