Why Is That So Funny?

A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy

John Wright

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781780010724
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Recitazione e provini

A practical investigation of how comedy works, by a well-respected practitioner and teacher. With a Foreword by Toby Jones.

Comedy is recognised as one of the most problematic areas of performances. For that reason, it is rarely written about in any systematic way. John Wright, founder of Trestle Theatre and Told by an Idiot, brings a wide range of experience of physical comedy to this unique exploration of comedy and comedic techniques.

The book opens with an analysis of the different kinds of laughter that can be provoked by performance. This is followed by the main part of the book: games and exercises devised to demonstrate and investigate the whole range of comic possibilities open to a performer.

Why Is That So Funny? will be invaluable to teachers and performers and fascinating for anyone interested in how comedy works.

'a welcome relief from the flood of performance studies theory, being firmly based in a lifetime of practice... a must for any budding physical comedy performers - and an inspiration for everyone who treads the boards, whether they think of themselves as 'comedic' or not' Total Theatre Magazine

'John Wright's magnum opus... a real labour of love and it is hard to believe that there is any aspect of the subject that he does not explore and explain... essential' British Theatre Guide

WHY IS THAT SO
FUNNY?

Introduction About Laughter

One of the first jobs I had as a director was to stage ‘the blasted heath scene’ from King Lear as an exercise at a north London drama school. The student I found to play Lear was a loveable lunatic with a huge sense of humour. He was a bear of a man – Hungarian, I think – and had very little English, but what he lacked in language he made up for in passion. His terror of the elements was of biblical proportions – as indeed were the elements themselves. The wind and the rain were created by Henry, who played Lear’s Fool. Henry was a small Japanese actor who would throw himself across the room and attack a thundersheet and then throw buckets of water over himself and the King. This would send Lear into blind terror one minute but, as he tried to control the text with his wayward English, he became a gentle and genial host the next. During ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks’, he talked to the wind and rain as if they were his friends that he was inviting round to tea. We all has a great time, except the principal of the school and his immediate acolytes, who all loathed it. They described our interpretation as disrespectful to the text and accused me of reducing tragedy to farce and of behaving irresponsibly. I was stunned. I had never met such prurience. Once they’d all gone we sat there in dispirited silence, looking at the wreckage of the rehearsal room.

Henry, who’d excelled himself on the thunder sheet, told us a disturbing little story that has stuck in my mind ever since. In halting English he said, ‘This is story of first performance ever. Before rules.’ (I have since learnt that it was first recorded in an ancient book The Kojiki, known as The Record of Ancient Matters, written about 712 AD in Japan.)

This is my version of Henry’s story, with no conscious additions on my part:

“The great Sun Goddess is in a petulant rage after an argument with her brother. She hides herself in the depths of a dark cave to sulk, and the world is plunged into the deepest darkness. All the other gods start to gather round the dim glow at the mouth of her cave and try to persuade her to come out again.

A young goddess is particularly angered and frustrated by the darkness and, on seeing an old wooden bathtub near the mouth of the cave, turns it upside down to make a small platform and starts to stamp on its base. The other gods look round to see what all the noise is. Her stamping turns into a small child having a tantrum. She laughs, and they laugh, and they all want more. More and more gods gather round to watch her scream and stamp and fret and punch the ground. She laughs, and they laugh, and they all want more. She stamps again and again and her stamping turns into a silly little dance. She laughs and they laugh, and they all want more.

Her dance becomes more graceful and more delicate with pretty little jumps. She laughs and they laugh, and they all want more. Her dance becomes slower and her smile becomes coy and playful, and the more she dances, the more she laughs, and they laugh and they all want more. She begins to touch her body and the gods begin to roar, and she laughs, and they laugh, and they all want more. She unfastens her kimono and lets the silk slip from her shoulder, and she laughs, and they laugh, and they all want more. Her kimono drops to the ground and she shakes her naked body, she struts and stamps and dances and jumps. And she laughs, and they laugh, and they all want more. She begins to stroke her body and her nipples become erect, and she laughs, and they laugh, and they all want more. She stamps, she kicks, she slaps and punches her body all over and she grabs her nipples and rips them out and holds them up for all to see, with the blood running down her arms, and she laughs, and the gods roar and roar and roar, and in the depths of the cave, the sulking Sun Goddess hears the roar and, fearful that she is missing something, comes charging out, and the world is once again filled with light.”

Before rules, apparently there was no such thing as genre. One element bled into the other. The parodic and the comic, the aesthetic, the erotic, the dramatic and eventually the tragic were all part of one great whole. Before rules, there was no conscious acting, and no conscious art. This young goddess got up on her upturned bathtub for a bit of fun. Simplistic, you might think. I’m not so sure. Today, God is no longer in ‘His heaven’, and we are what we are, but none of us knows quite what that is. Genre is breaking down and the margins between reality and illusion are continually being eroded. Back then, in the bright blue ether, this ‘first performance ever’ was inspired by the desire to keep the audience’s attention and to keep them amused. Back then, in the year minus zero, when none of these questions existed, the gods were having a laugh. What started as a bit of fun resulted in being something else entirely, but their starting point was laughter, and laughter runs through this story like ‘Blackpool’ runs through rock.

I prefer to talk about laughter rather than comedy because laughter is less conceptual and more specific. You do something in a certain way and either we all laugh or we don’t, as the case might be. It is a simple contract and it is non-negotiable. We know exactly where we stand with laughter. Laughter has universal coinage. Through laughter, we establish a reciprocal relationship with the audience; you’re not doing comedy if nobody laughs.

We tend to define laughs by their context. For example, we might say ‘That’s a cruel laugh’, or ‘That’s an ironic laugh’, or ‘That’s a dirty laugh.’ But if we look at laughter from the point of view of how lifelike you might be, or how out of control you might look, or how outlandish your behaviour might be, or simply how surprising your action might seem, then we can start to narrow things down to four different kinds of laugh elicited in an audience, indicating four different aspects of comedy:

• The Recognised Laugh

• The Visceral Laugh

• The Bizarre Laugh

• The Surprise Laugh

Each type of laugh defines a different level or quality of audience response, and each type is a catalyst that enables us to identify different levels of emotional engagement and rational understanding of the work. The four aspects of comedy operate either independently, each with its own specialised dramatic function, or in conjunction with each other as a part of an entire comic sequence.

Why Do We Laugh?

In 2003, the BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures were given by the eminent neurologist Dr Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. In his first lecture he asked the question ‘Why do we laugh?’ and went on to say that laughter is a specific and universal trait for us humans:

“Every society, every civilisation, every culture, has some form of laughter – except the Germans.”

He explained that a Martian ethnologist would be perplexed to see large groups of people ‘suddenly stop, look round, throw their heads about and make a funny staccato, rhythmic hyena-like sound.’ Apparently our species of Homo sapiens has a laughter mechanism ‘hard-wired’ into our brains. But ‘why did the brain evolve like this?’ he asked, ‘and how did it evolve through natural selection?’

He outlined what he described as ‘the common denominator of all jokes and all humour, despite their diversity’:

“You take a person along the garden path of expectation and you suddenly introduce an unexpected twist that makes us reinterpret all the previous facts.”

He emphasised that the vital comic element in this reinterpretation is that our conclusions must be inconsequential or trivial if we are going to laugh. He went on to cite the classic banana-skin routine:

“A portly gentleman striding purposefully along, only to slip on a banana skin and be sent sprawling on the floor.”

If the gentleman had cut his head open in the fall and was left lying there in a pool of blood then, he argues, we’d all be on the phone for an ambulance. It would be a potentially serious accident that would arouse our feelings of empathy. In this instance there would be no twist in the story and our original interpretation would have been borne out. The ending would be anything but trivial and we would have no cause to laugh. According to Dr Ramachandran:

“Laughter evolved as Nature’s way of signalling the all-clear.”

In other words, if the portly gentleman were to get up again with no apparent harm being done, then we would probably laugh in order to reassure each other that he is OK, and to share the fact that now he looks more stupid than he did before. For a more atavistic example, imagine the following:

A small group of our Stone Age ancestors are hunting in the forest, armed to the teeth with stone axes and pointed sticks. Suddenly they’re stopped in their tracks by what sounds like a wild beast caught in a thorn bush. Instantly, they surround the spot and are just about to attack when the foliage parts to reveal the tousled head of one of their children, wild with rage.

The sound of laughter would dispel the hunters’ aggression and reassure everyone, including the child, that everything was OK after all.

Our desire to assure each other that there is no cause for alarm accounts for the refrain in the Japanese myth: ‘She laughed, and they laughed, and they all wanted more.’ We share big laughs in a way that’s spontaneous and empathetic. We’ll seek eye contact with complete strangers standing next to us. We might even hold on to each other, as if for support. Laughter is infectious and spreads quickly in an eager crowd. In the circumstances of the myth, where there were no precedents for young goddesses leaping up and cavorting about on upturned bathtubs, I should imagine that they all needed continual reassurance and continual ‘OK signals’, and I’m not surprised that they wanted more.

This young goddess was playing her audience. She was following her impulses and entertaining the crowd. She started off playing with pleasure but, as the story went on, her laughter became increasingly ironic and eventually grotesque. We don’t know whether she’s laughing out of pleasure or not. The incessant refrain after each unit of the story only emphasises this ambiguity and highlights the role of the audience. Are they goading her on or simply joining in her game?

The Recognised Laugh

I don’t suppose you laughed out loud when you read the Japanese myth, but the event started as a joke. The goddess’s stamping was reminiscent of a child having a tantrum. The audience laughed because they recognised the parody. Now their laughter had a context. They not only recognised the accuracy of the tantrum but they also recognised the pertinence of the parody of the behaviour of the Sun Goddess sulking in her cave. From then on, the propensity towards laughter is sustained throughout the entire incident because everyone knew exactly what she was doing, so they all laughed. The ‘OK signals’ were sent back and forth and, with that much assurance, she felt a wild freedom up there on her bathtub, and her need for assurance became addictive. Her desire to keep the attention of the audience was palpable. She had to keep them watching or their attention would drift off to the cave. This was the motor behind everything she did. At the beginning I should think she was really enjoying herself. I can imagine the parody being very funny in that context, as is the silly little dance that it leads into. She probably enjoyed the striptease, but only a mad person would have enjoyed playing anything that happened after the kimono came off. At this point, darker feelings started to show behind the laughter. The audience started to match her audacity with their own. They were more interested in the shock value of what was happening in front of them than anything else. It reminds me of an American television series, Jackass, where a team of people are filmed doing painful and potentially dangerous feats like attempting to ski down steps, or having baby alligators bite their nipples. (There seems to be a common theme emerging here.) People laugh at these things, and the team members laugh at each other, but it’s more bravado than comedy that we’re looking at here, where the most disgusting antics get the biggest laughs.

It’s as if our young goddess was laughing in spite of herself towards the end, but those final roars of the crowd, as the blood ran down her arms, remain ambiguous. Are they roaring out of approval or outrage or disappointment? We shall never know. This is the point behind the myth. Ambiguity is at the heart of our theatrical response. What’s chalk to me is cheese to you. The fact that we’re still wrestling with this awkward question is evidence of its theatrical potency. It’s all gone that step too far for everybody involved. The crowd can’t stop watching, and some of them even seem to like it. This is the point where events overtake the game and make laughter impossible.

But the ‘act’ started from an idea that was childlike in its simplicity. She was poking fun at the Sun Goddess in the cave. She was doing ‘a take off’, and everyone had a clear reference point. In the beginning, the laughter was recognisable.

It is a common misconception amongst students that they should try to be original. We’ve all been taught to be wary of stereotype and cliché and, as a result, we’ve learnt to mistrust the ordinary and the mundane.

Keith Johnstone in his book, Impro, makes a similar point. ‘What’s for tea?’ somebody says in an improvisation. ‘Fried mermaid,’ comes the reply. Of course everyone laughs. That’s what I’d call a bizarre laugh, which is more challenging to sustain. Keith Johnstone goes on to explain that ‘sardines on toast’ would probably have been a much more useful reply because we would all know exactly where we were and the action could develop in a more recognisable way – which is what I’d call a recognised laugh. This isn’t funny in itself, although it could well get a laugh because it is so ordinary.

When running a series of workshops at a festival in Norway, I was once in the embarrassing position of being required to do an impersonation of a typical Norwegian to a large audience. In the absence of anything else to do, I sat down, leant forward, and looked intense, which was exactly the way I saw the audience looking at me. They recognised what I was doing, and they laughed. They laughed at the normality of the situation. Originality might be funny in the short term, but after any length of time, it’s simply baffling. Typicality is much more useful. Which is why the vast majority of our comedy is based on recognition. We laugh because we can see ourselves in that situation. We laugh because we understand and because we can share that understanding. Recognition is at the heart of the way we represent our humanity on stage. But it must be remembered that in art, all our representations of life, no matter how real they might appear to be, are the product of carefully made choices. Verisimilitude might be at the heart of recognition but it isn’t the key to theatrical truth. We want something more.

Today, with reality TV and sitcoms like The Royle Family, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the work of Steve Coogan, we’ve taken recognition comedy just about as far as we can go. In the case of The Office and The Royle Family, immense care has been taken in the wr...