Why Is Point-Of-View So Important in Comedy?

Why Is Point-Of-View So Important In Comedy?

In this lesson, we’re going to explore why POV plays such a huge role in comedy.

I stumbled across so many great strategies for POV Humor while creating this lesson. But in this lesson, I want to focus on the big picture. So we’ll look at how POV Humor is different from conventional jokes and then I’ll show you the one rule that allows for POV Humor to be so effective and simple.

What Is Point-Of-View (POV) Humor?

POV humor, as I use it here, refers to a situation in which none of the characters are trying to be funny. The humor depends entirely on the listener’s POV.

When Andrew Dice Clay’s speaks, his character is not trying to be funny, at least, not from his perspective.

The same is true sitcoms and funny movies. More often than not, the audience is the only POV that sees something as funny.

The characters either fail to recognize the humor or are being entirely serious.

POV Humor vs. Joke Telling

In standard jokes, the comedian uses setups to create safety and punchlines to create a violation. The juxtaposition between them is known as a benign-violation, or more simply, a Comedic Conflict.

POV Humor is probably the most “naturally occuring” type of humor in the world because it’s so simple to use. It doesn’t require creating your own Comedic Conflict from scratch. The Comedic Conflict is often baked-in from the beginning.

POV Humor is easily the #1 tool that sitcom writers use to create humor. It’s an incredibly effective way of creating humor in a believable way.

It doesn’t require any specific types of setups or punchlines. It doesn’t even require good structure or wording to be funny. That flexibility is what makes it so important in comedy.

Broken Assumptions & Predictions

POV Humor works in almost the exact opposite way of a Broken Assumption Joke. In a Broken Assumption, the setup line creates safety by leading the audience to make logical assumptions, expectations, or predictions. The PL introduces a violation, which then breaks one or more of the assumptions made in the punchline.

This forces the audience to quickly shift from safety to violation, creating a Comedic Conflict in the middle.

So Broken Assumption jokes require that the audience’s assumptions or predictions are incorrect for the joke to work.

POV Humor and Assumptions

However, POV humor requires that the audience is able to understand and correctly predict or empathize with a someone’s POV. The assumptions the audience makes about a character must be correct or the humor won’t make sense.

Take one of Bob Nelson’s characters, the “drunk guy hitting on a girl at the bar.” For the humor to make sense, the audience must be able to make correct assumptions about the drunken man.

Knowing that the character is drunk allows the audience to make predictions about his behavior, but more importantly, it allows the audience to understand and empathize. If you changed anything about Nelson’s POV, the bit wouldn’t make sense.

A sober person saying “I must be full” would be confusing. But we instantly understand how and why a drunk person might think have a crazy idea in a way that is entirely believable.

This strikes at the very heart of Comedic Conflict. There’s a clear violation because the audience realizes the sentence doesn’t make sense. Spilling water on himself is what sets up the punchline, but the fact that the character is drunk is what really sells the entire joke. Without being drunk, there’s no safety. The audience wouldn’t be able to justify a sober person saying something that ridiculous, meaning there’s too much violation and not enough safety.

#1 Live Your Reality

If I had to boil everything down to one rule for great POV Humor, I’d say that great POV humor is about fully committing to a skewed reality.

POV Humor is rarely about a funny person living in reality. A much more common and effective writing strategy is to place a straight person in a slightly warped reality and allow the humor to arise naturally.

Whose Line Is It Anyway? – Let’s Make a Date

This is what the Whose Line Is It Anyway improvisational comedy game “Let’s Make a Date” does so well. The game is setup like a typical dating game show, where a female contestant is trying to decide which bachelor to go on a date with by asking questions.

In the improv game, each of the three comedians is given a secret personality trait.

Their job then becomes to live that reality throughout the entire game, and to do it so well that the other player is able to guess what is written on their secret card.

This sets up a situation in which the only way to get a laugh is to use POV Humor. Conventional punchlines would fall flat because the audience judges everything they say based on the POV. If a line isn’t true to the character or doesn’t make sense based on what the audience knows, the joke will fail.

It’s not that the character is a funny person. It’s that their reality and the audience’s reality don’t match up quite right, creating a Comedic Conflict from the very beginning.

Earlier, I said that conventional jokes almost always require comedians to introduce both the safety and the violation by themselves. This is where a lot of the “pressure to be a good comedy writer” comes from… being solely responsible for both sides of the equation.

This isn’t true for POV Humor though. Any improv comedian who has had the good fortune of being a part of an excellent improv troupe will tell you that there’s no stress on stage. The humor flows naturally. It seems counter-intuitive to non-improv’ers, but the more control you give up, the funnier a scene gets and the more effortless it feels, both to the improv’er and the audience. Great improv flows so naturally that some people refuse to believe that it’s not pre-scripted.

The only reason a scene flows so well is because an improv comedian is never solely responsible for both sides of a Comedic Conflict. Each improv comedian can simply live their skewed version of reality, which will naturally conflict with other people’s reality.

Because the Comedic Conflict is baked-in, it takes away the stress of having to come up with something funny to say. The comedian can live their reality and trust that their reality will naturally clash with someone or something.

#2 – Skewed Realities Create Comedic Conflict

Let’s focus on the second-half of the definition for great POV Humor… the reality must be skewed.

Let’s be honest, laughing a stupid person’s expense is one of the joys of life. That’s why “fail videos” are so popular.

If you ask the person what he or she was thinking, you’ll learn that their version of reality wasn’t quite right. Whenever reality and a person’s perceived reality are different, there’s going to be some type of tension or conflict.

In this video, the Comedic Conflict comes from reality and perceived reality being different. The man’s perceived reality is that the ice is thin. So, in a weird way, it makes perfect sense of him to do a cannonball. If he had intentionally tried to hit the ice like he did, it wouldn’t be funny. We’d still think he was really stupid, but we wouldn’t laugh at that stupidity because there’s no safety.

A skewed reality is a great tool for creating Comedic Conflict.

Green Screen

One improv game takes this to the extreme. In the game Green Screen, one character stands in front of a green screen to cover a breaking news story. The only catch is that the reporter doesn’t have any idea what’s being put on the green screen.

For about 90% of the game, the reporter is in the dark. Not only does this take the pressure off him to force a joke, but it actually makes it impossible to tell a joke that makes any sense. How can you tell a punchline if you have no idea what the setup is? The only option left is for the reporter to live his reality.

How A Skewed Reality Creates Comedic Conflict

The result of the improv-comedy game Green Screen is a lot like a high school student trying to give a speech on a book that he obviously forgot to read.

Scenario 1: The Timid Student

Imagine a high schooler giving a speech on a book he hasn’t read.

In one scenario, the high-schooler knows he hasn’t read the book so adjusts his speech/behavior. He speaks timidly, mumbles throughout the speech, and keeps his comments very ambiguous so that they can’t be too wrong.

Such a situation wouldn’t create much humor because it’d kill the chances for Comedic Conflict. There’s no tension between what the audience knows about him (he didn’t read the book) and how he is behaving (like he didn’t read the book). There’s no Comedic Tension between those two ideas, so all humor is lost.

Scenario 2: Unearned Confidence

But what if the opposite happened? What if instead of changing his behavior to being timid and shy, the student doubled-down and walked up to the front of the class with complete confidence?

Instead of givign ambigious answers that “might be wrong or right” he gives very specific answers that are obviously wrong. That situation would be hysterical.

The Comedic Conflict of POV Humor

In both situations, the audience understands what’s actually going on. The student hasn’t read the book. The only difference is how skewed of a reality the students were living in.

The timid student adjusted his behavior to fit with the situation. Since “what you see is what you get,” there weren’t any violations. Everything was safe. That means any humor that comes out of the timid scenario would have had to find a new way to create a violation… which likely would have been very awkward and forced.

The confident student lived his own reality as well, but he allowed his reality to be misaligned with everyone else’s reality. To be funny, the confident student doesn’t need to create a violation because his unearned confidence and bizarrely specific comments already doing that for him. The harder he tries to appear like he knows exactly what he’s talking about, the funnier the situation becomes.

This is exactly what you see in game Green Screen. The reporter tries to answer things as specifically as possible to create Comedic Conflict. (Ex: “It all started with a poorly timed bald joke.”)

Application

There are many ways to apply this idea of a skewed reality outside of improvisational comedy. POV Humor only requires that there’s conflict between two competing ideas.

For example, in Jim Carrey’s Canada bit, he deals with the misconception that Canada is always cold. Instead of trying to convince Californians that it isn’t always cold, thereby minimizing the conflict between the two realities, he instead magnifies the conflict using a sarcastic response.

Just as we’ve learned this video, the actual comments by Carrey’s character aren’t trying to be funny. The Comedic Conflict is baked-in. The only thing Carrey needs to do after building this skewed reality is fully commit to it.

Sometimes the tension is more subtle. Patrice O’Neal is known for being extremely authentic and real. He was able to use POV Humor in ways that allowed the audience to really identify with everyone’s POV.

Summary

This video has focused on the underlying mechanic of POV Humor: Fully committing to a skewed reality.

It wasn’t able to tackle more subtle ways of using POV Humor. We could easily devote an entire video to how comedians like Patrice O’Neal can get the audience to identify with his POV or how “drunken characters” are able to create psychological safety and thus get away with saying the most bizarre or insulting things possible.

I also had to edit out so many great examples of POV humor, the most painful being Maria Bamford and Pablo Francisco.

Regards: Best machetes

Learn More About Comedic Conflict

Learn More About Joke Structures