How sabre-tooth tigers (probably) helped invent comedy

One of my kids is currently at the age where they’re just starting to make up their own jokes. However, and I say this as kindly as I can, they’re not yet at the age where they understand why things are funny.

From an adult perspective, that is. I’m sure they’re killing it on the primary school circuit.

I’ve long had an obsession with comedy. My parents had a real love of comedy and I grew up listening to and watching a range of classic and contemporary comedy, ranging from 1920s black-and-white films to 60s and 70s classics and the latest sitcoms and stand-up DVDs.

I always wanted to be a stand-up comedian. I gigged a bit in university, but decided I didn’t have it in me to travel the country, bombing in pubs up and down the land, in order to master the craft.

The point of all this is: I’m well-versed in comedy. I’ve studied it a lot.

So when it came to trying to explain to my kids why the ‘joke’ they’d just made up didn’t work, I was surprised I couldn’t offer much.

But I did give it a lot of thought in the following days, and this is what I’ve come up with.

Tigers and falling pianos

Comedy is basically about surprise. Anthropologists think it’s likely that laughter was originally like a quick-release mechanism for all the tension your body develops when you see something scary.

For example: a sabre-tooth cat appears out of nowhere and cave-Rewan’s body gets ready to run (likely) or kick its ass (unlikely).

But what if that tiger was then crushed by a falling piano? Sorry, that’s my 1920s comedy influence peeping through. Imagine the tiger was crushed by a falling rock.

Well, cave-Rewan’s body is all ready to party but his friends have just texted to cancel. Where’s all that energy going to go?

Hence the laughter. It’s a ventilation system for the bodies of people who no longer need to do an emergency poo in order to run away from predators faster.

Over tens of thousands of years we’ve kept that mechanism, because laughter is fun, right? But sabre-tooth cats became harder and harder to find and so laughter got adapted.

Evolution realised that laughter made us feel good, so it was worth laughing. The trigger, though, remained essentially the same: surprise.

Bait and switch

Except that the unexpected isn’t enough. If all you had to do to make a joke was say something unexpected, everyone would be a comedian. We’d be laughing constantly. Imagine trying to get open-heart surgery.

There’s a reason why the opening to a joke is called the ‘set-up’. While a joke has to have a surprise, the surprise can’t come from anywhere.

It has to come by leading you towards an obvious conclusion and then delivering a curveball. The curveball still has to work within the logic of the joke though, and this is what makes it tricky.

Here’s an example that is a staple of panel show introductions. It goes something like this:

Rewan is a big lover of cats. Known for leaving dead animals on the doormat, weeing on furniture, and burying poo in the garden, Rewan has two cats.

It works as a joke because the set-up leads you to believe that the next sentence is describing cats. The punch-line is that the joke has been talking about me (and this is a joke, at least in the sense that it’s not factual).

On the other hand, just saying ‘Rewan leaves dead animals on the doormat’ isn’t a joke. It’s just a bizarre, illogical statement. Especially because I stopped doing that years ago.


Header photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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