Objective Humor

[alexxkay]

Speaking of "Noises Off", there's a running bit where Christopher Reeve's character complains about the implausibility of the plot of the play-within-the-play. It reminded me of this (rare these days) nice bit of writing/observation from Dave Sim. He's discussing the nature of humor, in the context of doing a Three Stooges parody:

Curly, as much as possible, acted with his arms at or near chest height or higher and his upper arms always at a forty-five degree angle from his shoulders. Which I imagine was something Curly had figured out on the Vaudeville "circuit" (like Groucho's walk: when someone asked him about it, Groucho reportedly said, "One time I started walking funny, sort of crouched over, with my knees bent. It got a laugh, so I left it in"). I think Curly noticed that when his arms were up high he got bigger laughs, so he did everything with his arms up high from then on. And it is, it's funny. His arms are doing all the regular "arm" things, but they're doing them up high. I marked an elevation on a sketch of [the Curly parody character] and I realized that just marking the elevation was funny. Putting a line there made an ordinary [Curly] drawing into a funny [Curly] drawing. Why? No idea. I suspect it might have to do with looking child-like. Small, heavyset children swing their arms much higher than usual to maintain balance. But I really have no idea why, and I never even thought to ask it until I was writing this. In comedy, you don't ask stupid questions, like why. If it looks funny to have a line there, you just figure out something to put on him at that height. Just as in Vaudeville where you didn't analyze why it got a laugh, you just paid attention to what got a laugh and you did it a lot after that.

Probably the best example of what I'm talking about here is one of the Stooges' shorts which was called "Gents Without Cents" (No. 81, 1944).

[snip intro of description]

...most people know this one because of the "Niagara Falls sketch" which is the comedy within the comedy, a Vaudeville routine the Stooges do as part of the above-mentioned "song and dance review". If you're a guy, you probably know it from the "Sloooowly I turned, step-by-step, inch-by-inch..." line, right?

It's hilarious.

I must've watched it a hundred times and I still laughed. "Ger, come and watch this." And he laughed. Ger is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a slap shtick or Stooges kind of guy. The band members in the background who are probably watching at least the fourth or fifth take are laughing. Why is it hilarious? I have no idea. As a written piece of material it makes absolutely no sense. There is no logic, not even any internal logic, to the "Niagara Falls sketch". I'm convinced it isn't even a Stooges routine since only Curly is remotely "in character". I think it's just a classic Vaudeville bit that got honed and chopped and tweaked and fiddled with, everything that was funny was left in and everything that wasn't funny was left out and the results are right there. It's a guaranteed "laugh-getter". It is, quite possibly, the only living example we have of the type of "writing" where the ultimate content was determined completely and exclusively by what got the biggest laughs from a Vaudeville audience. I can picture the original writer saying to whoever the original trio was, "But... but... if you leave out the eighteen lines in the middle, it doesn't make sense." And the original trio saying, "Watch." And they went out and did it and got bigger laughs. Nu? So? So, leave out the eighteen lines.