Welcome back to the offices of The Comedy Bureau, staffed by comedian Laura Lexx and tame historian and comic lecturer Olly Double!
This week Laura and Olly decide to knuckle down and really focus on something that keeps rearing its head during their discussions of other aspects of comedy… comic theory. Why are things funny? What is funny? What is humour EXACTLY?
Now, it’s sort of another one of those impossible questions to answer and so Olly has the task of describing some of the popular comic theories to Laura. Even trying to describe all the theories would be a vaguely impossible task and so we have narrowed it down to just three options…
In this first episode of a three-part series on comic theory they focus in on Incongruity Theory. We’ve been kind to you in the first four episodes but this is where the show takes a hard turn down Nerd Avenue and then proceeds at a cautious 20mph all the way to Detail House.
We begin our comic theory exploration series with Koestler’s theory of bisociation and discuss how a lot of jokes revolve around using two planes of idea and then merging the two for a point of laughter. In the next two episodes in our comic theory series we will be looking at the Relief Theory and the Superiority Theory so don’t miss those coming up in the next few weeks.
In this episode our sources were:
• Koestler, Arthur (1970) “The Act of Creation”, Pan McMillan
• Morreall, John (1987), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, Albany, NY: SUNY Press
• Carroll, Noel (2014), “Humour a Very Short Introduction”, Oxford University Press
Comedians Laura mentioned in this show are:
Paul F Taylor - @paulyftaylor
Podcast cover art by Adam Richardson
Artwork for The Comedy Bureau is by Matthew Grant at Tiny Worlds Workshop @tinyworldsworkshop.
Our video editor and credit sequence designer is Lucas Orme.
Music was devised and performed by Olly Double.
Huge thanks to the whole team at Podspike for invaluable advice and help launching and marketing the show.
All media enquiries via Julian Hall textualhealingpr@gmail.com
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