White, black, green and even red. Political, absurd, topical and stereotyped. Jokes have been, are, and will continue to be one of the backbone humorous units of humor, of comedy, one of the most widespread and common ways of trying to provoke laughter in an audience, whether it’s after dinner, to loosen up a complex situation. or on stage. This Saturday is the international joke day, but, despite still being present, the joke has changed from how it was before. Where are Jaimito, Lepe, Knock knock – Who is it?, or The curtain opens? Is the popular joke dead or just its industry? What makes us funny today?
The joke is “the basic unit of humor”, explains Kike García, co-director and teacher at the La Llama School of humor —a project devised together with Álex Martínez, Tomás Fuentes and Abi Enrech (owner of the La Llama specialized humor bookstore). Store)— and co-director of the satirical newspaper El Mundo Today. “It is something said or done with the intention of being funny. As long as the sender has the intention of hilarity, whether it is achieved or not, there is a joke.
This construction that uses classic narrative elements —such as irony, satire, hyperbole or repetition, among others— is a very old human invention. The first known compilation of jokes is the Phylogelos, it comes from ancient Greece and is an anthology of 265 jokes made around the 4th century AD. by Hierocles and Filagrio.
To achieve its goal (laughter), every joke must start with a clear and defined structure. “The structure of a joke is much like a logical syllogism: an understandable and accepted premise, in a framework that everyone buys into, but that the comedian can short-circuit, turn around to make something disruptive, surprising, or even violent happen. that the public is not expected, but, at the same time, it is coherent”, says García. In this way, when one of the thought patterns is broken thanks to this new unexpected element (although coherent and logical), one tends to laugh in response. For this reason, when heard more than once, the joke usually does not achieve its objective.
There have been many attempts from science to find the key to what makes something funny. However, to date there is no consensus on which theories or which preconditions best explain why some things are perceived as fun and others are not. A study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Review, carried out by professors from universities in Arizona, Colorado and Melbourne and entitled What makes things fun? An integrative review of the antecedents of laughter and fun, it analyzes “more than 20 different psychological theories that propose evaluations that characterize the appreciation of humor.”
According to the study, there are five conditions prior to comedy: surprise (perceiving something different from what is expected), simultaneity (having conflicting interpretations, beliefs or ideas at the same time), superiority (believing yourself better than something or someone), transgression (perceiving something that threatens your beliefs about how things should be) and resolution (perceiving that a stimulus or situation does not present a serious problem).
The study, however, also picks up on one of the problems with popular jokes and comedy in general: “A joke that is offensive today can be funny tomorrow and boring the next week.”
“The problem is that humor gets old very quickly,” says Kike García. Not only on an aesthetic level —“I can’t imagine a person putting on a tape of jokes from Arévalo, Capri or Mary Santere”—, but “on an almost moral level”. “Society and values ??change. When this happens, humor, which works as a short circuit of what is expected, remains old and out of date”.
Despite this, one thing is clear: “The popular joke is eternal,” says the director of the comedy school. The disappearance of the supports of the popular joke —the joke-telling programs, such as Party Night, Genius and figure or Don’t laugh, which is worse; cassettes, cd’s or even books- has not finished with the joke itself, but has meant the transformation of its support.
“You will find the classic jokes in memes, in phrases put in jpgs shared by whatsapp… that is very much alive, but nobody monetizes it, there is no industry like before. It is also very much alive on TikTok: you see tiktokers play scenes from popular jokes, from 60 years ago, from Capri, from Eugenio, from Lepe… it is still very much alive”.
And, finally, a joke that is also considered, according to a study, as the best in the world:
Two hunters are in the woods when one of them faints. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glassy. The other man picks up the phone and calls 911. He gasps to the operator, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator with a calm and soft tone of voice answers: “Take it easy, I can help. First, let’s make sure that he is dead.”
There is silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the hunter says, “What now?”
The popular joke is not dead, another thing is that they are good or bad.
