Funny How? Sketch Comedy and the Art of Humor

Abstract

Funny How? seeks to demonstrate what makes a great sketch funny. The simplicity of the book’s main goal is its great virtue and informs its best part: its summaries of a dozen and more sketches performed by a wide variety of comedians. Guided by a broad sense of what constitutes sketch comedy, Clayton picked these sketches because he loves them. This makes good sense, since the point of the book is to talk straightforwardly about what makes things funny, and not, for instance, to provide a scholarly history of the genre. This simplicity comes with a price, though, insofar as the book does not enter into a dialogue with contemporary humor scholarship or with current theories. If readers want to hear what the author has to say about specific sketches or be introduced to a method for summarizing sketches, this book may be of interest to them.The book includes a relatively long first chapter that seeks to articulate an approach to humor theory that stresses how humor is “irreducibly compound.” On this approach, humor “will therefore most fruitfully yield to a form of analysis that is receptive to the multiplicity of factors in its construction and sensitive to the ways they meld and combine” (47). The summaries of sketches that follow, then, are demonstrations of this approach. The idea that humor cannot be reduced to one factor and that any approach should account for many factors while avoiding unnecessary universalism is, however, common to most contemporary humor scholarship, and so the book’s demonstration of how reductive approaches are inadequate not unsurprisingly takes the form of simplistic takedowns of famous “postulates” (34) about humor from Hobbes to Kant, Bergson, and Schopenhauer. There are almost no references to any twenty-first century theories, such as Alenka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy or John Limon’s Stand-up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America, just as there are almost no references to humor scholarship, including scholarship on sketch comedy. The book’s contributions are not to be found in such scholarly conversation.The book’s subsequent chapters provide summaries of sketches generally grouped together by themes, including parodies, what-ifs, music, and rivalry. For the most part, the focus is on UK and US film and television sketches, with one notable exception being the toilet party scene in Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. The introduction opens with a summary of the famous parrot sketch by Monty Python and the Flying Circus, providing a good example of what follows throughout the book. The work here challenges us, compelling us to think through what makes the sketch funny and to consider how it might have been done differently. This strategy offers a useful way to think about humor and also a useful way to teach (one gets the impression Clayton is a fine teacher of humor). How would the sketch have been different if instead of being about a parrot being returned to a pet store, it had instead been about “a rubber hammer being returned to a hardware store?” (2). Or what if the pet had not been a parrot but another animal, such as a dog? (3) The provisional conclusion as to the sketch-comedy value of the parrot is that parrots “are not so compassionate that the death of an unknown parrot could be felt tragic, but also not so simply decorative as to make it an impersonal matter of return-and-replace” (3). It’s impossible to summarize adequately here the account Clayton provides because its value is in its attention to the details of the scene. If we are going to talk about what makes things funny in sketch comedy then we do need to get down to the details. A later summary of a mock advertisement for the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is another fine example of what Clayton’s approach has to offer in its careful attention to detail (113–18).The book concludes with a suggestion that Aristotle’s famous three modes of persuasion—ethos, pathos, and logos—might be instructively applied to theorizing how sketches persuade us to laugh (128). While this is an interesting suggestion, it would have made more sense to have introduced it at the beginning of the book and then to have tried it out during the summaries of sketches that are the substance of the book. This method would have been consistent with the simple approach of the book and perhaps provided a light illustration of how to think through comedy, which is what this book has to offer readers interested in sketch comedy and humor in general.