• Humour, or 'humor' as the Americans call it (clearly believing there's no you in humour) is the phenonemon of funniness, whether that's creating funniness or perceiving funniness. Should jokes have punchlines? Does laughing at alternative comedy - you'll remember the fashion for this in the 80s - mean that a situation is actually funny. I researched some jokes for many years, though admittedly not since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and yes, some of them were funny. Would the humour stand the test of time? We soon discovered that fads were decidedly lacking in any resilient hilarity. Did people laugh at slapstick? Yes in very niche applications. But in real world situations most people would find greater humour in a reliably constructed knock-knock joke or even the casual prejudice that has fallen out of favour in the bit of my lifetime I feel out-of-kilter with. How many jokes is enough? Some people will risk a set consisting of just a handful, but if one joke dies, all humour might be lost. A 32, 36, or 40 joke routine works much better. Traditional humour has sufficient tension and robustness without sacrificing widespread appeal for a marginal zeitgeisty edge. This can be improved more readily with stagecraft and timing anyway. Laughing is the only reliable indicator of humour, and it is the exhalation of short breaths, something that even rats have been shown to do.

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