Humor Flashcards
Sneak in Some Sarcasm Make funnier comments with understatements or overstatements. Real-life Examples You visit your friend’s house. They have a toddler, Ethan, and you notice blue and red crayon marks all over their living room wall. When presented with any situation, you typically have three choices for offering your observation/opinion:
- Overstate and exaggerate the facts of the situation. 2. State the facts exactly as they are. 3. Understate and downplay or deny the facts of the situation. You visit your friend Abbie, and her dog Ben jumps on you and smothers you with giant slobbery kisses. Literal Observation: Your dog really likes me. Understatement: I have a feeling your dog likes me. Understatement 2: Do you think your dog likes me? Understatement 3: I don’t think your dog likes me very much. Overstatement: I think your dog wants to marry me!
Parody
Parody Parody is making fun of another entertainment or information product. Any piece of writing, type of presentation, or anything intended to be presented to the public in any medium can be the target of Parody. That includes anything from a specific TV show, movie, book, magazine, or anything—all the way down to a church pamphlet, bus schedule or street sign. Beyond specific presentations or creators, overall media like movies, the stage or visual art can also be parodied.
Zynismus : Klaas steht am Pranger, wurde zuvor mit Obst beworfen und wird dann interviewt mit der Frage
wie er es schafft im Showgeschäft seine Würde zu bewahren.
The Power of Irony- In other words, the
words that come from your mouth are the opposite oft he emotion you are feeling. If you´re starving, an ironic statement might be something like „I´m so full I need to unbuckle my belt it is like thanksgiving in July“ Irony is all about contrasting and drawing some interesting and creative judgement out of it.
The Power of Irony- In other words, the words that come from your mouth are the opposite oft he emotion you are feeling. If you´re starving, an ironic statement might be something like „I´m so full I need to unbuckle my belt it is like thanksgiving in July“ Irony is all about contrasting and drawing some interesting and creative judgement out of it:
Word versus tone: I am a people person. People like me! You would yell this in angry and menacing tone!
Words versus Body Language: „I am a people Peron. People like me would be said with huge sowl, and making a knife motion across your neck to indicate that you hate people“
Ironic simple: Make a statement and then compare it to something that ist he exact opposite of what you are feeling. „That person is as flexible as a bridge“
Hyperbole- Something positive about a negative statement and the other way round. Flat Tire, best news of the week
Irony happens when the literal meaning of what you write is the opposite of the intended meaning. “Opposite” is the key word. Irony is all about opposites. If the Subtext you want to communicate is “nuns are weird,” you would use Irony to create a joke by expressing the
the opposite opinion: “Nuns are perfectly sane,” or “There’s nothing strange about dressing in a cumbersome headdress, locking yourself in a church and avoiding sex for the rest of your life.” The trick to Irony is heightening the contrast so that the two things you’re contrasting are truly polar opposites
Sarcasm- You say things
without saying them. If he says somethig is wonderful, he says it wonnnnderful in a tone that immediately lts you know he thinks the opposite. Sarcasm is saying the opposite of an objective fact, a subjective emotion, or thought. Bob plays tetris at work the whole time- Bob deservs a medal for worker oft he year. There is heeps of traffic on your way: What are we going to do when weg et to our destination super early?
without saying them. If he says somethig is wonderful, he says it wonnnnderful in a tone that immediately lts you know he thinks the opposite. Sarcasm is saying the opposite of an objective fact, a subjective emotion, or thought. Bob plays tetris at work the whole time-
Bob deservs a medal for worker oft he year. There is heeps of traffic on your way: What are we going to do when weg et to our destination super early?
- The driving force of a huge chunk of reactionary comedy is identifying and communicating things that are out of place. It sounds ridiculously basic, but that’s observational comedy in a nutshell. Jerry Seinfeld’s billion-dollar empire is entirely based on pointing out things that are a little off. Commit these to memory and make them a habit.
1) Check the background first – everyone will be looking at the focal point, you want to scan the edges first. That’s where the out of place things will be. 2) Be vividly aware of context. Many things are only out of place relative to what is going on. A shout at the devil t shirt isn’t funny at a metal concert, but it is at a baptism. 3) Go the extra mile. Comedian Mitch Hedberg had a great joke about seeing someone throw a tomato at a band who stunk. It’s a dated, but familiar image. He goes the extra mile to state: “who would bring a tomato to a concert?” In this case you can’t spot the dog until you think about how the situation arose. 4) Remove preconceived notions – we accept a lot of things as normal, but if we set aside our biases they might actually be weird. This is why people from other cultures find so much of what we dostrange – it’s unfamiliar to them. Try to see things through an unbiased set of eyes.
The more detailed and specific that final painting is, the funnier it becomes. For this reason, saying “I don’t want to end up as a pizza delivery boy” isn’t as interesting or funny as its
detailed specification into “I don’t want to end up as one a Super-Mario-lookinglooking frat boy in a plastic cap driving around in an old, overused red Scooter that hardly breaks 50 so I can deliver sub-par food and cold beverages to people who are partying and enjoying life far more than I am, all the while hoping they will pity me enough to give me a tip that allows me to go home at night and watch Netflix until I fall asleep”
And you can also exaggerate someone’s behavior. Let’s say you’re sitting down at a coffee table and the person you’re interacting with isn’t sure about where she wants to sit, so she touches one chair, moves it back, then gives up and sits on another chair instead. You can now
exaggerate this as if she’s trying to touch every single chair in the coffeeshop and say something like “Hey you haven’t touched that chair over there yet, do you want me to go get it?
Let’s imagine you are at a seminar with some fellow coworkers and currently a boring speaking with a dull, monotonous voice is on the stage. The seminar is supposed to last for the next eight hours, having eight speakers in total and the person currently on stage is the second speaker for the day. How could this situation get worse?
“I hope there is nothing else. I hope it’s just this guy telling us stories about his life for the next seven hours”
Misdirection: when you say one thing and ten proceed with an immediate opposite( That show is great, except everyone in it, It is a secret but let me tell you) You´re stating something in the first part, then
contradicting it immediatelly in the second. „This juice is awsome. Didi t come from the garbage disposal
3- The Six Question approach: In other words, you can´t play with expectations unless you define them and are familiar with their baseline. You can´t bend the rules in baseball if you don´t know what to start with.
Who is involved? What is happening? Why is it happening? When is it happening? Where is it happening? How is it happning? Answer all the questions in an expected manner. Afterwards write a contrary, silly, surprising, or outrageous answer. How can you make the situation unique and shocking? Now insert the wrong answer in the right context
Go watch some old Robin Williams. Robin Williams didn’t tell jokes. he became the jokes. When you talk about his sets, you are describing it like you watched a movie. This man said this or this woman did that. But the only person on stage was Robin. He creates such an incredible visual that you see what he is saying. Maybe you have a bit about going to the store and being frustrated by the cashier. When you tell the joke, you just say what happened.
The joke may hit, but if you added the cashier or someone in line as a character, the visual becomes stronger and the laugh becomes bigger.
Retitling. This is when you reframe an action under a different name, usually in an exaggerated manner. “Raj is walking in and out of traffic” becomes “Wow, Raj is embracing his inner Evil Kinevil.” “Did he just watch that terrible romantic comedy?” becomes
“I guess he is trying to find his feminine side, huh?” “He gets the same coffee every day” becomes “His blood is probably half latte these days.” Stating the opposite. This is when you answer a question or statement with the opposite of the truth in a joking and often sarcastic manner. “Who the hell was that?” “I’m guessing it wasn’t Brad Pitt.” “Where does this road go to?” “Mordor, I think.”
