Humor

I'm not sure how much it amuses anyone else, but I usually find humor mileage in slightly archaic/formal word choice/sentence structure being used to talk about something normal or mildly absurd. (e.g. using words like "whereupon" and "thereunto" in a sentence about candy).

Decompartmentalisation is funny (because it's slightly painful to the listener to have their compartments broken, and yet it's clever and informative). Decompartmentalising social conventions is a staple of standup.

Steve Martin's autobiography, Born Standing Up tells about how he learned to become funny. On the way, he spent some time as a serious philosophy student in college. Lewis Carroll's symbolic logic was a revelation to him in that it was a hilarious exercise in rigorous logic.

He starts to describe his early research into developing a new kind of comedy:

The moment you say the punch line, the audience either laughs sincerely or they laugh automatically or they don't laugh. The thing that bothered me was that automatic laugh. I said, that's not real laughter. What if I could get real laughter, like the kind you have at home or with your friends, where your sides are aching.

That's a much stronger kind of laugh .... It worked. It helped me create something new.

He gives examples of things that never had been done before a live audience before, (some later would up being adapted into The Jerk). Later, he has a startling moment when it seems a brand-new show, Saturday Night Live has developed similar ideas and is already rocketing to fame on national television.

P.S. This review of the book describes Steve Martin as the "rationalist of the absurd," although they seem to mean mostly that he has always had a very serious and methodical approach to being wild and crazy.

Quasi-quote from Jim Davis, author of Garfield: "If I can't think of anything funny, I have one of the characters hit another."

Well, yeah, but that's Garfield.

Which reminds me of an observation I've made: Consider that almost anything you can do to Garfield makes it funnier. (See: the Garfield Randomizer, Garkov, Garfield Minus Garfield, Garfield As Garfield, Lasagna Cat, Realfield, Square Root Of Minus Garfield, etc.) This does not work on things that are merely unfunny. In the same way that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, reversed unfunniness is not humour. This means that Garfield is not merely unfunny, but antifunny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherently_funny_word lacks a Phyllis Diller reference, though it may be covered by the Mencken quote.

I am a fan of Scott Adams's (writer of Dilbert) blog posts on humor. Here's his post on his humor formula. Excerpt:

The core of humor is what I call the 2-of-6 rule. In order for something to be funny, you need at least two of the following elements:

Cute (as in kids and animals)

Naughty

Bizarre

Clever

Recognizable (You’ve been there)

Cruel

I invented this rule, but you can check for yourself that whenever something is funny it follows the rule. And when something isn’t, it doesn’t.

And here's his post on humor writing, with reference to this post. (These links are all to the Internet Wayback Machine because he's moved his blog and the original posts are now offline. You might find the HTML a little off, so if you don't see the content of the blog post, just scroll down a bit.)

Is repetition funny?

Is repetition funny?

Is repetition funny?

I'm not sure the author of Garfield is the man you want to be taking comedy lessons from. I have never met a person where the subject of Garfield has come up and they have thought it funny.

I'm rather fond of Benign Violation Theory, as interpreted by Robin Hanson. Basically, funny things are those that benefit people you're sympathetic with (in particular, raising their social status) by violating existing social norms.

This suggests that humor is linked to a psychological adaptation for updating social norms for one's coalition's benefit. Laughing allows people to coordinate change of the norms (you don't take seriously a norm that is a joke). Humor as art works as superstimulus for this adaptation.

specially if it includes an insult about an acceptable target.

Sounds like you're referencing Hanson, who references benign violation theory. Who is the target of insult in the Garfield quote? The characters, the author, or his readership? Which would be acceptable? I suppose the case to make is that he's insulting his readership and the quote is intended for non-readers.

The Computer Theory of Humor looks interesting. The details in that entry are a bit unclear, but it appears to characterize our humorous response as being a bit of a kludgey and excessive hack to remove our focus from the incorrect interpretations we were forming prior to the punchline about pink elephants.