Explaining the Funny, And so Non Funny, Then Funny Again Joke

At that place's a scene in the rom-com parody They Came Together that goes likethis:

Bartender: "Yous expect like y'all've had a badday."

Paul Rudd: "You tin can say thatagain."

Bartender: "Well, you lot came in here looking like crap and you oasis't said verymuch."

Rudd: "Tell me aboutit."

Bartender: "Well, you lot came in here looking similar crap and you haven't said verymuch."

Rudd: "You lot can say thatonce again."

Bartender: "Well, you came in here looking like crap and you lot haven't said verymuch."

Rudd: "Tell me nearlyit."

… and this repeats, like, eight more times. Lid tip to the Globe and Mail for transcribing the bartender flake, and as that paper's film critic points out, this is one of those scenes that starts off funny, half-pivots to slow, then, somehow, swings another 180 degrees back to funny. Information technology'southward hard to resist; even if yous don't entirely want to reward the tedious gag with a laugh, you probably practise. Behold the power of what we will heretofore refer to every bit "long-joke," for lack of an actual, establishedterm.

So, while information technology's truthful that nothing is less funny than trying to explain why a joke is funny, it'south still worth asking: What makes the long-joke piece of work? "It's a puzzling question," said Peter McGraw, a sense of humor researcher and co-author of the recent volume The Humour Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. McGraw said that while he couldn't recall whatsoever studies that examine this miracle specifically, it does remind him of his ain research on comedy and timing. In a newspaper recently published in Social Psychological and Personality Scientific discipline that tested the classic saying, "tragedy plus fourth dimension equals comedy," McGraw and his colleagues used tweets near Hurricane Sandy to plug some numbers into that equation: Xv days was too soon, 99 days was too long, just 36 days was justright.

And the spirit backside that finding could easily transfer to the long-joke, McGraw said. "The passage of time helps make humor more benign, and less threatening. But the further passage of time just makes it more benign," he said. "Information technology takes a situation that's kind of normal, a fairly typical scene in the movie. And what it does is it starts to create a violation — it starts to make the situation uncomfortably awkward. And I remember information technology'southward that awkwardness, that discomfort, that is really the root source of a lot of what we observefunny."

And at the moment, the scene becomes uncomfortable, McGraw explains, "what ends up happening is at that place's this sort of meta thing, where you recognize that this is beingness done purposefully equally a joke, rather than something that'southward supposed to mirror reallife."

When the long-joke works, information technology could also be thanks to a second one-act equation: the Dominion of Threes — the idea that jokes are funniest when at that place are no more or no fewer than two repetitions preceding the punch line, Jyotsna Vaid, a psychologist at Texas A&M who studies sense of humor, said in an email to Science of Us. "We establish support for this idea only just when each repetition involved a progressive incremental shift in meaning," Vaid said in an electronic mail. "When the repetition did not involve whatever progression in meaning or intensity, nosotros constitute that jokes with three repetitions before the punchline were actually judged funnier than those with 2 repetitions. Long jokes would seem to exist an farthermost case of this latterblazon."

I'm not a large Family Guy fan, simply I've seen plenty of it to know that this is a well-worn device that the show's writers use. Comedy proficient Vaid rated this "mildlyagreeable":

Another, and I would fence funnier, version of this comedic device is this Tig Notaro fleck, wherein she drags a stool across the floor, for two and a half minutes straight. That'south it. That's the entire bit. Shh, justwatch:

McGraw also points out that Andy Kaufman did this back in the '70s, and, to my 9-year-sometime mind, the image of high humor was this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (Vaid, for what it's worth, didn't find the latter at all amusing.) At any rate, there may be a case to be made for an additional sense of humor equation: absurdity plus tedium also equalscomedy.

The Funny, Then Not Funny, And then Funny Again Joke