Reading Response 2

Chapter 3 of the Comedy Writing was pretty interesting. It starts off with the six ingredients to making humor. Without one of these ingredients, just like a food recipe, humor is just not the best it can be so all of the ingredients have to be there. They are all accurate and make sense as to what needs to be there for humor. The six ingredients are: target, hostility, realism, exaggeration, emotion, and surprise. The target he talks about is not the audience you are relating to necessarily. Using humor makes one feel superior to the other. If someone is making fun of something or someone else, it makes that person feel like that have an edge on whatever they are making fun of. The best target for humor is probably yourself. Many people will not get offended if you make jokes on yourself, whereas if you make a joke on other people they will get offended easier. Whether you make a joke about yourself or someone else, there will be at least one person who gets offended. It is more reasonable to make your jokes not so offensive but still funny where everyone can relate to them.

I thought this chapter was pretty interesting because it gives you the most ideas as to where and what to make jokes about. Some of the topics that are good to joke about are: yourself, sex, celebrities, places, products, and ideas of other people. One of the main things in this chapter that got my attention was the part about Hostility. That is the second part to the ingredients. Many people think comedy is cruel. When you ridicule someone, you think its funny but the person receiving the joke does not. There for it is cruel. That is why in comedy it is called “ridicruel.” When someone uses this type of comedy they feel superior over someone like mentioned above. They feel like they are on top of the world when in reality they aren’t. Many people enjoy these jokes because they are the best ones to tell. Admit it, they are the funniest. These are the jokes comedians tell the most. They really do not care whether it offends people and when they tell them, most everybody in the audience laughs because it’s hilarious. A lot of the topics that are harmful to people are race, religion, where one lives, etc. It is funny when it is not about you. When it is about you it is not so funny because you get offended.


An example: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/940092/ (this one has bad words so we might not should watch this one)