Page 119 - The Language of Humour

106 STAND-UP COMEDY
so well expressed’ (Pope). It’s as if he wakes up some part of the brain
that has been stifled by conventional ways of thinking.
He appeals to the audience to share the way he perceives the world.
Rather than a burst of ‘sudden glory’ at the downfall of others
(Hobbes’s superiority theory—Unit 4), the laughter comes from delight
in shared human experience. He chooses the familiar and
commonplace, so no member of the audience is excluded. Of course,
this is context-bound to the extent that you need to belong to a social
group that watched Doctor Who in childhood.
This type of humour is sometimes called ‘observational’—rather than
witty one-liners, there is a gradual exploration of a situation and its
absurdities. Like the cartoons of Gary Larson, strange images are
created: the child hiding behind the sofa, asking the dog for updates on
the plot. The cause of humour can partly be explained by the
incongruity theory. Not only can dogs not talk, we do not think of
animals as creatures with our interest in television plot. In Eddie
Izzard’s comedy the animal—and inanimate—world is credited with
human properties.
His is a surreal vision, for example of pears in a fruit bowl resolutely
remaining rock hard, till the people leave the room, when they rot. The
audience laugh—now we come to think about it, what else can explain
this observable fact about pears? The observations of the Daleks are
absolutely accurate in their detail: the wheels, the death rays, the
plungers and the three-pronged claws. First there is an element of
surprise, as the audience had probably never really thought about them
before. But there is the surreal slant of imagining these fictional
creations as having the same thoughts and feelings as we do.
This challenges our assumptions about what non-human life is like.
Names like ‘Ken’ and ‘Steve’ are not the sort of names we feel are
appropriate for Daleks! It is strange to think of them having feelings of
puzzlement and insecurity. It is also a convention that we do not require
the same sort of logic for fiction, so a television audience would not
normally think about a more sensible way to overcome the Daleks. We
accept that there would be no dramatic plot if the heroes took the easy
way out—and went upstairs, across a carpet or over a ploughed field.
Eddie Izzard does not make one humorous observation and leave it;
he draws out the original idea or analogy. And the analogy is often:
suppose that animals or fictional characters worked to the same logic
and conventions as humans, then this is how you would see the world.