Be Funny Or Die – Joel Morris

Dunbar developed a theory to define the optimum size for these new human social groups. The Dunbar Number is the maximum number of active social contacts a human can usefully maintain with any degree of civility. It’s roughly 150 individuals, which is, pleasingly, roughly the size of a medieval village. The Dunbar Number is usually the membership level at which any online group (ostensibly set up to share information about the local primary-school field trip or discuss the music of a-ha) starts fighting amongst itself and fracturing into vindictive subgroups, making Dunbar the scientist who worked out the formula for the Judean People’s Front from Monty Python’s Life of Brian.I Dunbar said that groups of primates over fifty members find it difficult to groom one another physically, so had to find a replacement.

Social laughter is a noise that strokes us. The development of speech a little later meant that anyone who could use their language skills to cause the soothing sound of laughter became a valued member of the tribe, gaining high status, and, much later, lucrative appearance slots on TV panel shows. If we can’t groom each other, we will do something else that can be done over a wider distance and is similarly soothing. Language, gossip and jokes all developed alongside one another to help fill the niche left by picking ticks off one another and patting each other’s heads.

Comedy is inherently tribal. Think about how much a comedy show that you were told you’d like but didn’t enjoy makes you itchy and angry. Those aren’t the jokes for your people. ‘The idiots who laughed at this rubbish… did they think I was… one of them?’ Comedy acts as a team strip, a declaration of values, a fire to gather around and, in some cases, a flag to wave. The flag is our shared group identity, and that identity is reinforced by the humour we use within that group.

It’s why English people like to joke that Germans have ‘no sense of humour’, by which we mean either ‘a different sense of humour’, or more probably, ‘a slightly different sense of humour that also includes a love of some of our own most idiosyncratically English comedy such as Monty Python’. Hey, we’re all Saxons (we share a royal family, after all), and tribal identification gags usually target nobody more savagely than the people next door.

After all, they talk funny. (As Steve Martin once observed, ‘Those French have a different word for everything.

I have read plays by people who had never written anything before and enjoyed them and the same goes for novels, but I have never laughed at a good comedy script by someone who has never written one before… There is a skill in making people laugh.

Marty Feldman 1kitap1.com/en With thanks to the patrons of this book: Charlie Brooker Goo Flah Adam Tandy FRSA Alistair Wallace 1kitap1.com/en Disclaimer Comedy seems to be hardwired into us. It changes the way we see the world and helps us to navigate our lives. And, maybe because of this, it belongs to us in a way that no other art form does, with the possible exception of music.

Like music, the comedy that grabs you as a teenager is often the stuff you can’t shake off. Our comedy and music tastes, our favourites, are equally deep, instinctive and inexplicable. Comedy climbs into our hearts at vulnerable times. It can be a comforting fixed point during turbulence and change (teenage, see?).

It can help declare our values when we want to say who we are, or feel our identity is under threat. It can neutralise danger with absurdity. It can provide relief when we need cheering up. It can help us bond with friends. What makes us laugh is as much part of our identity as what makes us dance, or cry. We like what we like. We don’t like what we don’t like.

And that tells us what we’re like. So, the first disclaimer is that I’ll draw examples from the comedy I love. This is affected by what I grew up with, and my own tastes, and I might leave out some of your favourites, so sorry in advance. I’ll try and make sure stuff I refer to is popular enough to be assumed as comedy currency, but I will tend to grab things that I can easily reach for, and those will necessarily be revealing of my own comic preferences.

The other, trickier, disclaimer is that times change, and people (especially comedy people) can be peculiar, and occasionally do and say things that are less than admirable. Because of that, please assume that a reference to someone’s work is meant to be just that.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 0a13f162d78fc247
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,913,836 bytes (3.733 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 359
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 446.35 minutes
• Total Words: 89,269
• Total Characters: 517,509
• Average Words per Page: 248.66
• Average Characters per Page: 1441.53

Most Frequent Words

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