Comedy is about surprise, so why are we so keen on the familiar?

Having just returned from the Edinburgh Fringe I am of course angry with comedy. 

My show, The 007 Conspiracy, wasn’t for everyone (The List gave it two stars, but The Chocolate Ocelot's Pouch gave it four, and I think we can all agree which of those sounds the more official), so I’ve been thinking about why this was. There were definitely flaws in its composition, and in my performance, but ultimately as a surreal conspiracy show about a non-existent Bond film, I think it maybe wasn’t ‘familiar’ enough. 

Well a POUCH thought it was good, so.

What do I mean by this? Well, a lot of comedy is, in essence, surprise: a sudden and unexpected change in meaning. Your average one-liner will usually contain a set-up and a punchline. The set-up presents a story which appears to have a given meaning; the punchline suddenly changes the story, revealing that the meaning was different all along.

E.g. When I broke my arm I just used my cast to masturbate. Unfortunately they said ‘the play was suffering’ and I was ‘abusing my position as director’.

The set-up implies one meaning, the punchline reveals another, which is more absurd. 

But, as much as we like to be surprised, we also like to feel comfortable, especially when laughing as a group. Live comedy is a social situation, and laughter a form of communication. We fear laughing at something that our friends won’t find funny, or that is perceived as too offensive by the rest of the room. So ideally we want to be surprised, but in a socially safe way, and this is where the ‘familiar’ comes in. If a comic jokes about a topic the audience have seen joked about before, they can be sure it’s okay to laugh. This means we’ll sometimes laugh at a joke when we already know the gist of the punchline.  

Look at the three topics below. If you saw a comic begin a bit about each of them, what would you expect the crux of the gags to be?

1.  Eric Pickles
2.  Community Support Officers
3.   Vegans

Pretty easy, this one.

       

      The answers are, of course:

1.  He’s fat
2. They don’t have any authority
3.  They mention it all the time, usually unprovoked

There’s a shared anticipation when these kinds of topics are introduced. We know, essentially, what the joke is going to be, and that it’s okay to find it funny; it’s just a matter of how it’s expressed. As an audience we are comforted on the macro level but ready to be surprised on the micro level. In performing comedy that’s rooted in familiarity, then, a stand-up creates a very safe space for people to laugh. This is why successful mainstream comics tend to be excellent gag-writers who stay within a framework of popular observation.

Unfortunately, the BBC’s new ‘Sitcom Season’ (a shitty blizzard of reheated 70s and 80s comedies) takes this idea of familiarity to a new level. In fact, it thumbs it into the mouth of a confused pensioner to be slowly masticated, swallowed, regurgitated and eventually dribbled onto a cardigan with the force of a comically aged tortoise emptying its bowels for the final time.  

It's sad. We’ve already had Upstart Crow this year, which was a bit like watching a slightly worse version of Extras’ meta-sitcom When the Whistle Blows, until Liza Starbuck appeared and it became exactly like watching a slightly worse version of When the Whistle Blows. But now we’ve got Are You Being Served?, Porridge, Up Pompeii! and Young Hyacinth. I don’t mind a bit of nostalgia, but the BBC might as well just broadcast John Cleese using a branch to push David Jason through a bar in a relentless three-second animated gif. For a month.

It's as funny as it looks.

I actually watched the new episode of Are You Being Served? All of it. And it’s basically just innuendo. This puzzles me, because I'm not actually sure who enjoys innuendo anymore.

In the 80s it probably took some effort to find footage of people going at it like rabbits, but now it takes literally no effort to find footage of people going at it with rabbits. So in an age where extreme imagery is so accessible (by which I mean easy to find, not easy to get into; I imagine bestial pornography is a bit like Curb Your Enthusiasm in that you need a few episodes before you really get it) how can an allusion to breasts be cheeky? Channel 4 broadcasts a dating programme where contestants have their genitals out for literally the entire show, yet in Are You Being Served? I’m expected to laugh at a woman having "grabbed some balls" on a tennis court (spoiler: the player's testicles). 

Obviously the studio audience laugh at everything with the volume and desperation of a tipsy single mother on an eHarmony date, but the patterns of the laughs are odd. A character will make an innuendo, e.g. “I grabbed his balls on the court”, and they’ll all die in hysterics. But then another character will say something which does nothing to further the joke, nor twist it, and basically just reinforces the original insinuation, e.g. “I hope he didn’t cum out of his dick when you grabbed his balls by which you mean testicles I assume”, and they'll all lose their shit again. It’s bizarre. There’s no surprise there, even on a micro level, so why are they laughing?

My original assumption was canned laughter, but now I’m not so sure. It might just be that this is what humour’s become. Not surprise, but the memory of surprise. A reminder of what it felt like to hear a joke for the first time. Maybe no-one wants a sentence to take an unexpected turn in 2016. Perhaps there’s no demand for pullback and reveal now that ISIS are sailing towards London at 100mph (I’m hazy on the details here). 

What people seem to want is something familiar – comforting. And if there are enough people laughing around you, I guess that still feels like comedy.