I've noticed that although specifics vary, there are certain rules of thumb. These include the value of timing, such that a silly dad joke told in the right moment can bring down a studio audience, or the power of misdirection, often allowing an audience to laugh twice at the same joke - first to the assumed punchline, and then to the real one. And of course, I understand the importance of the audience, and why good humor is sometimes just pointing to where the joke is hiding, often in plain sight.
Perhaps the most well known rule resembles how comedy might be described in a math textbook:
Humor = Tragedy + Time.I believe Mark Twain is credited for discovering the formula, perhaps by accident in his writing lab when he realized the characters in Huck Finn wouldn't have considered their own tale 'humorous'. Indeed, setting the story forty to fifty years in the past looks like a textbook example of a humorist using time, whitewashing tragedy to amuse the audience. You might not initially think stories playing on racial stereotypes are funny, but with enough time you can laugh until you, too, are blue in the face.
Anyway, I've seen the formula in action quite often throughout my late night laugh tracking, each chuckle strengthening the evidence that humor is the offspring of tragedy. But isn't it true that a twice told joke is the same old joke? I said I've watched a lot of comedy clips during lockdown, not that I've rewatched any. I think some more thinking is in order to reconsider Twain's equation. Like anything, humor can age poorly, so I propose this formula:
Tragedy = Humor + TimeThis explains why repeating a joke rarely reproduces the laugh. It also might explain why I don't know anyone who considers Huck Finn 'humorous' - the closest anyone comes is using humor in an academic way, as if the book meets some humorless dictionary's definition of humor. How much longer could Twain have waited before the joke was on him? Time always kills the joke, the same way time often makes the joke, and perhaps the only time we forget this is in laughter.
The truth of this post, though, or at least the basis of it, is rooted in the lockdown. It has nothing to do with the trivial musings about an equation or a runaway list of literary references. The truth is that the first laugh of this lockdown was at the start. I laughed despite all the ways my new role on the sidelines of public health would change my life. I laughed because when I thought about it my life wasn't going to change all that much. And in hindsight I was right, not much has changed, and if I dismiss working from home or the library being closed then almost nothing has changed. I've lost my social outings, of course, but this is no surprise, I anticipated as much when I laughed. I could laugh knowing that I would count on my three R's of reading, running, and writing to fill the social void, to carry me through a lonely, solitary time, just as they'd done for me in the tragedy of a not so distant and not so dissimilar past.
The only thing I'd overlooked when I laughed was that I was laughing. The truth is that the first laugh of this lockdown was the last laugh. The most important component of humor, of comedy, isn't time or timing. It isn't misdirection, it isn't knowing your audience, it isn't pointing at the joke. The most important component is sharing, and laughter is the moment we all share something together - our vision, our understanding, our perspective. In isolation, without sharing and togetherness, there is no laughter, and whatever joke I'd laughed at a month ago has fallen flat, its failed syllables finding familiar grooves in this soundproof room, each passing day returning me a little closer to the tragedy that I'd ever so briefly, ever so recently, had found a way to laugh off because I wasn't alone, and couldn't see that the joke was on me.
