As I approach the feat of watching the entire nine seasons of Seinfeld for the third time, I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld’s personal view of his profession. The man has a gleeful obsession and reverence for making others laugh. As well as having a love of what he does and an encyclopaedic knowledge of his field, he firmly believes that comedy is an art.

He doesn’t mean it in the colloquial sense, like “there’s an art to opening a jam jar”. He means Art with a capital ‘A’. And I have to agree with him.

Jokes are often portrayed as formulaic. It’s claimed that ‘funny’ has a few different forms but they can all be broken down into component parts and the only originality comics inject into them is the subject matter. The subject can be anything that fits the formula; the subject is secondary, almost superfluous. All it does is it defines one comic from another. Well Seinfeld himself, in his breakthrough style of observational humour in the 1980s, completely trashed this view.

Anyone wishing to dissect observational humour will find themselves quickly thrashing about in deep water. What makes an observation, one that anyone and everyone can (and does) make, funny? The quick shot answer is the delivery. But in that case, anything would be funny. Reading the chemical ingredients of cold medicine would be funny (oh, wait, I think they did that one in Season 3). Replicating the snore of an overweight cat would be funny. A good delivery is necessary but not sufficient for a laugh outside of the realm of nonsense.

What makes a good delivery is comprised of two things: the truth and its absurdity. Any punchline in any joke needs to touch upon something that is true, a truth the audience can connect with and recognise. And what makes that funny is the comic’s ability to illuminate the absurdity in that truth. Life is absurd but carries on like it isn’t. If life didn’t pull the wool over its own eyes then it would grind to a halt, and that’s putting it mildly (see Camus).

I have often argued on these pages that art is the subjective reflection of an objective but humanly indefinable truth. Comedy does exactly this and the truth it reflects is the absurd. We can’t define why there is no meaning or point to our lives but it can be reflected in everything we do.

This is easy to say about observational humour, but what about slapstick? Well, nonsense and silliness is the stablemate of absurdity. What about puns? Puns are probably the most complex philosophically. We depend on our language to give structure and objectivity to our lives and puns undermine and mock this, they are a flickering recognition of our underlying existential crisis. Ok, I’m getting a bit pretentious, but you get my point. Here are some puns in the hope of forgiveness:

I took the shell off my racing snail to make it go faster but, if anything, it just made it sluggish.

And from the late, great Ken Dodd:

I told the Inland Revenue I didn’t owe them a penny because I lived near the seaside.

Breaking taboos is also funny because it undermines our social constructs. Which leads to the greatest philosophical question of them all: if farts were socially acceptable, would they still make us laugh? (Ignoring any highly unusual sounding ones – they would be filed back under ‘slapstick’).

When talking of the absurd it’s hard not to mention Camus (I’ve done so twice now). The novel he wrote to exemplify the absurd was called The Outsider, something that a lot of comedians are said to be. They are the ones most able to call it, looking in from the periphery.

You can of course relate the absurd and not be funny at all, but this is where subject is important. Topics of the absurd that threaten our instinctual drive for survival, or topics so taboo they find the audience’s wall of morality too high to surmount, will be treated with full seriousness and contempt. Hence a comic can have an audience aching with laughter with one joke and boiling with rage at the next.

The final piece of the comic jigsaw, in particular with stand-up, is authority or charisma. If what I’m saying is true, you need to be a persuasive character to mock and strip away the fabric of people’s lives, to remove the cosy blanket they wrap themselves in to protect them from the abyss, and not be beaten back by hostility. You need to win the argument with a crowd of people holding their own personal smoke machines. It’s a lonely and vulnerable place but every laugh is a reward for having touched upon a common bond of human truth and understanding – like any piece of art.

This month's favourites:
   Princess Nokia, 1992 Deluxe
   Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (It's a long book, alright!)
   Bright Star (2010)