A Brief Guide to Humour: Just for Laughs

While a good joke always depends on its content and delivery, there are many ways that comedy can reach an audience: from clowning to witty wordplay to gallows humour… here is a guide to five kinds of humour.

1. Slapstick

Slapstick is a form of physical comedy where the body is used to make people laugh. It can include practical jokes, clowning, mime, stunts or making (‘pulling’) funny faces. When accompanied by dialogue, it is called ‘farcical humour’. Farce incorporates absurd elements in a parody or mockery of real-life situations or people that appear in an over-the-top, stylised form. The pie in the face is a staple of slapstick comedy, as is pulling a chair away as someone is about to sit down. 

2. Satire

Satire is the use of humour, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticise the vice or incompetence of powerful people. Satire is often situational, meaning that the humour comes from a situation that a set of characters are placed in and how they react to it. It can use insult or sarcasm, considered lower forms of humour. A higher form is comic irony; an example can be found in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, when the US President breaks up a fight by shouting, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”

3. Wordplay

Wordplay is the witty manipulation of the meanings and ambiguities of words. Acronyms, alliteration, anagrams, oxymorons, palindromes and sexual innuendo are all forms of wordplay! William Shakespeare is the most acclaimed English punner in history, but even the simplest examples can triumph: Lorna Rose Treen won The Funniest Joke of the Edinburgh Fringe 2023 award with: “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.” 

4. Deadpan

Deadpan or dry humour is humour that is delivered impassively or with a straight face. Witty exchanges are often deadpan. Dark, black or gallows humour (where the topic is death) are often delivered in a deadpan style. Dark humour is not laughing at misfortune, evil or tragedy; it is using humour as a means to approach or process serious topics or situations. Because of the necessary skill and sensitivity required, it is often only appropriate among those directly affected. For an example of deadpan delivery check out Monty Python’s “The Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch.

5. Scatological

Scatological or toilet humour can be a useful way to bring the pompous down to earth. As the name would suggest, it deals with basic bodily functions such as defecation, constipation or flatulence, topics often found in traditional English song and rhyme. Satirical magazines such as Private Eye delight in toilet humour, which is used to lampoon public figures. Dirty humour is humour about sex, once quite a taboo subject in Britain! This gave rise to many adult jokes that still find their audience among overgrown adolescents. An example of scatalogical humour is breaking wind in a crowded lift.