In my 23 years of life, I have come up with a lot of ideas. As you'd expect, these vary in terms of quality from the questionable: marketing a range of gangster rapper cologne called ’50 Scent’, to the truly doomed to failure: opening a Monk-Chanting club called the ‘Monastery of Sound’.
However, there is one idea, one shining beacon of hope that I have placed all of my faith in as a good one. Granted, it may not have the money-making potential (or, admittedly, originality) of some of my other strokes of genius, but it has enormous scope for making us think. And as a current student of philosophy, I believe that makes it very much more valuable.
So what is this amazing idea? It is simply this: the philosophy of comedy. In other words, analysing and defining why we laugh at certain things and not at others, and how things are funny. At first glance, this is a seemingly impossible task, as the act of finding humour in certain things is clearly a subjective one. Not to mention the fact that comedy is unique, in that it is the only discipline whereby the response is instantaneous and physical - laughter. It is unlikely that having not laughed at a joke initially, one would laugh after hearing an explanation as to why it was funny.
In many ways, my conception of the philosophy of comedy is similar to a form of ‘aesthetic appreciation’, in that it strives to find pattern and consistency in a phenomena which, essentially, comes down to personal opinion and taste. However, in terms of aesthetics, it seems as though one can find beautiful that which they did not initially, in light of further information and explanation. Here, as I explained above, is where the philosophy of comedy differs. There is only one way to explore this idea further, and that is through examples. Being as I am, a no-holds-barred, die-hard fan of both stand-up and situation comedy, I have tried to form my theory around the former comedic style in particular.
Of course, the most beautifully simple and highly effective style of stand-up comedy is that of the observational. Made immeasurably famous in recent years by a certain Michael McIntyre, this style takes innocuous and trivial everyday habits, occurrences and situations, and places them under a microscope. This process is humorous, because it plays on the familiar, things we are all aquatinted with as part of our daily lives, and through amplifying them, causes us to question them. In what is certainly my favourite of the McIntyre work, Michael analyses the concept of the ‘man drawer’, creating a hypothetical scenario whereby everything within it is suddenly required:
Through creating such a elaborate storyline that uses all elements of the ‘man drawer’, Michael engages with the audience and causes laughter, because the audience member recognises these elements from their own life, but has never considered their significance. This sketch causes the thought process ‘hey, I do that in my life! I’ve never thought about that before. Why do I do it? Now it seems such a funny thing to do!’ In this case for example, to have kept a key from a home you no longer live in that in all the years it has lain dormant, only finds a use when a secret agent calls with a mission for you to complete, that for some reason involves breaking into your old house. What we are laughing at here is, essentially, ourselves.
Another stand-up style, this one a tad less popular and widely-appreciated, is what I refer to as ‘personalisation comedy’. (Yes, I have invented this terminology, but please don’t lose faith… ) The most proficient, successful and (in my view), excellent proponent of the ‘personalisation’ style is Russell Brand. Fuelled in no small part by his constant media presence, through his comedy Russell has been able to create for himself, a character, a stylised version of himself. I don’t mean this is the Al Murray, alter-ego sense, but rather through building his stand-up routines almost entirely on stories about himself and his own misfortunes. Russell’s infamous tagline ‘my life is a series of embarrassing incidents, strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents’, is telling of this. So doing, he has created himself as a character with which every audience member feels connected on a personal level. The easiest analogy to bring out my point, is that Russell’s stage persona feels rather like a crazy, accident-prone, loose-canon friend whose ridiculous life you constantly marvel at, and use as a source of amusement. This is how Russell describes his catastrophic presenting of the MTV awards in the USA:
The response is a kind of ‘oh Russell! what are you like??’ laughter. The audience is so familiar with his character, they feel on such a level as able to laugh, in an affectionate and knowing way, at the disastrous situations he purports to have found himself in.
Thirdly, there is the uncommon branch of stand-up that is what I consider to be ‘philosophical comedy’. This style is pioneered by my ultimate hero, Simon Amstell, and draws from a dark centre of humour to make light of otherwise depressing or humbling notions. Simon’s style is particularly self-effacing, mocking his own anxieties, describing philosophical notions and ideals, whilst intertwining them with his own trivial experiences. This is possibly the most complex process of producing laughter, but I believe here it comes from a sense of, and indeed is a manifestation of relief from heavier notions:
Here, Simon’s real life applications of such notions causes a familiar relation for the audience to everyday situations, and so the laugh comes with the thought process that ideas which initially seem quite daunting, are actually quite amusing when set against day-to-day examples. Simon mocks his Jewish mother’s refusal to accept his brother’s non-Jewish girlfriend, a not uncommon and fairly trivial occurrence. He refers to some philosophical teaching he received from a cab driver, in order to attempt to heal the rift. Here, the humour comes from the juxtaposition of such idealistic and theoretical philosophy, next to a common, relatable, day-to-day dispute of modern life.
Finally, (and this is by no accounts a definitive list of comedic styles), there is the increasingly popular surrealist comedy. Surrealists function in a very different manner to the previous comics, in that their source of laughter is not rooted in the familiar, quite the opposite in fact. Surrealist stand-ups come in many different forms, but for me one of the cleverest and most interesting to explore is Noel Fielding.
From his initial greeting of ‘Bristol you cheeky little otters!’ and throughout his act, Noel causes laughter through sheer incongruity. Sometimes he achieves this simply by running two, randomly chosen words together. With stories that don’t link to each other, and bizarre, non-rhyming songs, it is impossible not to laugh, if only out of sheer bemusement. In this case, the humour lies within the unfamiliar, the seemingly haphazard nature of Noel’s anecdotes.
This is but the tip of the philosophy of comedy iceberg, but is a good starting point. Laughter is an instinctive and reactionary occurrence, something that cannot easily be faked or replicated. Due to this, the reasons and provocations behind it, I certainly believe anyway, are rich, varied and endlessly fascinating.