If I may wax poetic on the theory of comedy, and the theory of writing a series that basically repeats the same joke ...
It's not a coincidence that the timing works. What do 28% of the jokes known to the human race have in common? Including, I don't know. The guillotine joke, the charitable clergymen, all the farmer's daughter jokes, all the engineer jokes, "I'm going to have puppies," "It takes kidneys," "I'm afraid not," etc.
Give up? The answer is the magic number 3.
When it comes down to it, all those jokes are the same. The first person does something. Then the second person does the exact same thing, or at least a close mirroring of it. The third one appears to walk in the footsteps of the first two, but at the last moment shreds reality by doing something completely different, and the more radical the shift, the harder you laugh.
It's sort of the same way with comics that rerun the same gag. The first establishes the gag. The second establishes the fact that they're all the same. And at #3, you're on the horns of a dilemma, because if you just do the same thing again, the audience is going to get bored and go to sleep because they know the whole story. So you can do one of two things: You can twist the knife, like I did above, or you can keep it going and do the "infinite variations on a theme" thing, sort of like what I tried to do here and here. But the thing is, even if you vary it, folks are going to tire of it, so you've got to turn up the heat, making each iteration a bit more absurd, till things become a blatant parody of themselves and beyond. To magnificently mix metaphors, if doing this, you've got to boil the frog or you'll jump the shark. Did I succeed? (You'll notice I stopped writing both those series before I had to ,when I felt I couldn't turn the heat up much further.) Only you, fair reader, can be the judge of whether I stopped too soon or too late.
Though if inspiration hits, those series may be added onto.
---
ken.kaufman@gmail.com
