Explaining the Funny, Then Non Funny, So Funny Again Joke

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

Bartender: "You expect like you've had a badday."

Paul Rudd: "You can say thatagain."

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

Rudd: "Tell me aboutit."

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

Rudd: "Y'all tin can say thatonce more."

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

Rudd: "Tell me aboutinformation technology."

… and this repeats, like, viii more times. Chapeau tip to the Earth and Mail for transcribing the bartender flake, and as that newspaper's film critic points out, this is one of those scenes that starts off funny, half-pivots to tiresome, and so, somehow, swings another 180 degrees back to funny. It'due south difficult to resist; even if you don't entirely want to advantage the deadening gag with a laugh, y'all probably do. Behold the ability of what we will heretofore refer to equally "long-joke," for lack of an actual, establishedterm.

And so, while it'south true that zippo is less funny than trying to explain why a joke is funny, information technology's still worth request: What makes the long-joke work? "It'south a puzzling question," said Peter McGraw, a humor researcher and co-writer of the recent book The Sense of humour Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. McGraw said that while he couldn't recall any studies that examine this phenomenon specifically, it does remind him of his ain research on one-act and timing. In a newspaper recently published in Social Psychological and Personality Scientific discipline that tested the archetype saying, "tragedy plus time equals comedy," McGraw and his colleagues used tweets virtually Hurricane Sandy to plug some numbers into that equation: Fifteen days was too shortly, 99 days was too long, but 36 days was justright.

And the spirit behind that finding could hands transfer to the long-joke, McGraw said. "The passage of time helps make sense of humour more than benign, and less threatening. But the further passage of time just makes it more beneficial," he said. "It takes a situation that's kind of normal, a fairly typical scene in the moving-picture show. And what it does is it starts to create a violation — it starts to make the state of affairs uncomfortably awkward. And I call back information technology's that awkwardness, that discomfort, that is actually the root source of a lot of what we noticefunny."

And at the moment, the scene becomes uncomfortable, McGraw explains, "what ends up happening is there's this sort of meta thing, where y'all recognize that this is being done purposefully every bit a joke, rather than something that's supposed to mirror reallife."

When the long-joke works, it could also exist thank you to a second comedy equation: the Rule of Threes — the idea that jokes are funniest when there are no more or no fewer than two repetitions preceding the dial line, Jyotsna Vaid, a psychologist at Texas A&Grand who studies humor, said in an email to Science of Us. "We establish support for this thought but only when each repetition involved a progressive incremental shift in meaning," Vaid said in an email. "When the repetition did not involve any progression in meaning or intensity, nosotros found that jokes with three repetitions before the punchline were actually judged funnier than those with two repetitions. Long jokes would seem to exist an extreme case of this lattertype."

I'm not a big Family Guy fan, simply I've seen enough of it to know that this is a well-worn device that the bear witness's writers use. Comedy expert Vaid rated this "mildlyamusing":

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

McGraw also points out that Andy Kaufman did this back in the '70s, and, to my 9-year-erstwhile mind, the epitome of loftier 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 charge per unit, there may be a case to be fabricated for an additional humor equation: absurdity plus tedium too equalscomedy.

The Funny, And so Not Funny, And so Funny Again Joke