Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and my day job is in a call centre, which supplies most of the material. I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing, can get silence in one room and a roar in another twenty miles away.
The theory that has helped me most is the benign violation account from a pair of psychologists, McGraw and Warren. Something has to be wrong (a broken expectation, a broken rule, a little threat) and at the same time safe. Tickling is an attack that doesn't hurt. A joke about a disaster works from a distance and dies up close, because the violation is no longer benign. That's ‘too soon’ in one sentence.
What I like is that it explains variation without making humour random. The Salford room and the Leeds room differ in what they feel as a violation, and in what feels safe. My joke about the call-centre script is a violation to people who've never had to read one and nothing at all to people who read one every day. One room gets the surprise; the other just gets the description of their job.
Then I found Aristotle saying, in the Poetics, that the laughable is a kind of fault or ugliness that causes no pain or harm. Which is benign violation, more or less, two thousand years early.
So: does this account actually explain the room, or is it a neat description that predicts nothing? And what about jokes that are funny because they're not safe?