Humour and Comedy

Make em Laugh

I thought the next thing to do in making a funny animation, was to research types of comedy, and what makes stuff funny.

When looking into humour and comedy, I first found the comedy as in the original type of comedy, not meaning funny in particular but types of story telling and the types of things you would find in an original comedy. This led me to look into what comedians need to know when learning about being a comic and learning about what makes a successful comedian and the genre of humour that people have. Whilst doing this a few caught my eye and started to show some idea development in my head.

The first being slapstick. This humour is driven from someone being physically hurt or violence is staged for comedic effect. This was especially apparent in silent film comedy sketches where they had to rely on body language to drive the joke home, so slapstick was often used as the joke as there was no other way of communicating what the joke was unless doing physical stand up.

The next type of humour which caught my eye is satire. This is comedy which mocks a person's weakness or some form of society. I thought that this could be incorporated into my animation somehow as it is especially apparent in this day and age thanks to shows such as "the IT crowd" and "The Big Bang Theory".

Morbid humour is humour which is especially dark and self aware of this fact, I thought that maybe I could incorporate this into some form of slapstick, which is an increasing theme nowadays, with internet cartoons especially where morbid humour meets slapstick to create some form of vulgar animation where someone is viciously maimed for the sake of comedic effect.