My grandfather died peacefully in his sleep, but boy were the kids on his bus screaming.

Many people wonder if being funny is something that people are naturally born with or if it’s an acquired skill.  In my opinion it’s a combination of both.  Some people are naturally funny but any one can be (or be better at it) if you understand what makes something funny. In fact it’s as simple as this equation…

Expectation + Surprise= Funny

Take the joke I used to begin this post.  As you begin reading it, you see the words “My grandfather died peacefully in his sleep…”  In your mind without even really thinking about it, you had some preconceived notions of what that means/looks like.  In other words, you had an expectation of how the story would go.  The surprise though was that he actually died while driving a bus full of kids.  Because you didn’t see that part coming, it makes it funny.

The reason this works is that we as humans do a great amount of assuming whenever we hear someone speaking.  Our minds just automatically begin filling in details that may or may not actually exist.  We do this to try to make sense of what we’re hearing.  So being funny is just taking what the hearer is already assuming and taking it abruptly a different direction.  In the sample joke, you assumed that dying peacefully in his sleep happened in a bed.  You never would have assumed a bus so when your assumptions get shattered the story becomes funny.

So as you’re telling a story, the greater you can get people to assume something in the first part of the story, the funnier it will be when you break down those assumptions in the second part.  Here’s another example, this time from horror author Stephen King.  One time a reporter asked him, “How to you come up with such imaginative ideas for your stories?”  To which King replied, “I still have the heart of a little boy…at home in a jar on my desk”.   Did you see it?  Expectation + Surprise= Funny.

Now obviously, delivery, timing, body language, etc, are also necessary to being funny but it all begins by first knowing the anatomy of what makes something humorous.  So now it’s time for you to try it. Here’s the beginning…

The Polar Vortex returned to the US this week…

Think about what the expectations/assumptions are from this sentence and then how can you shatter them.  Comment here or on Facebook with your completed joke or Tweet it to @gilbertthurston