A book by Stephen Evans
“Funny Thing Is, by philosopher and playwright Stephen Evans, is a witty, insightful look at what constitutes and characterizes comedy. With its accessible style and straightforward approach…, Evans examines humor from a variety of angles—philosophical, literary, sociological, psychological, biological—enhanced with his special insight as an actor and playwright. The analysis is profound but the material is lighthearted, often genuinely funny, and pleasantly insightful. Anyone who wonders at what makes us laugh is certain to enjoy Funny Thing Is.”
—BlueInk Review
ISBN:978-1953725479
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What the Critics are Saying:
Stephen Evans’s The Funny Thing Is is a perceptive dissection of the science and philosophy of comedy and comedic writing. This thorough analysis of the evolution of comedy is part philosophy primer, part social science, and part writing advice. The result is a savvy and complex anatomy of funniness, with suggestions for how to replicate it. Funny Thing Is melds philosophy, science, and personal observations to result in a multifaceted take on modern comedy—one with a heartfelt message.
—Clarion Reviews
Excerpt:
The problem with breaking something apart to understand it is that you break the thing you are trying to understand. But comedy is so complex, we need to start somewhere.
So to understand comedy as it exists now, let’s look at four primary elements:
- Physiological
- Cognitive
- Psychological
- Semantic
These elements are ways of looking at comedy, and they correspond to particular components of the phenomenon.
- Physiological (Laughter)
- Cognitive (Funny)
- Psychological (Humor)
- Semantic (Comic)
Or, to put it slightly differently:
- Laughter is a physiological process.
- Funny is a cognitive process.
- Humor is a psychological process.
- Comic is a semantic process.
Comedy is all of the above.
These are my terms. You can mix and match differently if you like, but for consistency I’ll stick with these.
The important thing to understand is that these components of comedy and the underlying elements didn’t all arrive on the human scene at once. In fact, thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of years may separate the beginning state from the current state.
So though comedy has evolved (and rapidly) in the last two thousand years, the underlying mechanisms of comedy have evolved over a much longer time. The primary elements of comedy had in the beginning little to do with the phenomenon of comedy, as we know it.
Instead, we can understand comedy as a recent arrival in human evolution that makes use of these underlying states and mechanisms to create its effect. And we make use of comedy according to our own intentions.
Trying to understand the elements all at once is pretty difficult. Most philosophers have generally looked at comedy through the lens of only one its components:
Plato through the physiological
Kant through the cognitive
Freud through the psychological
Aristotle through the semantic
Bergson through the synthetic
(This is a vast oversimplification of all but Plato, but a helpful one.)
If we look at the elements, one by one, and try to analyze them separately, maybe we can at least begin to comprehend the relationships and understand this remarkable human creation known as comedy.
