Pitiful Ploys at Humor pt 2

This is a continuation of my last post as there were too many types to cover so this one will cover the ones more commonly found in film.

Offensive Humor

Offensive humor is a bit controversial because it’s, uh, offensive. However, that isn’t to say that it can’t be useful; for example, if I wanted to make the hacker or the detective crass, then using this kind of humor is ideal. Since that is not a character trait I want, this is not the kind of humor I was going for.

A good example of someone who does offensive humor well is a stand up comedian named Jimmy Carr. He shows how to make offensive: you have to be more funny than offensive. How you are funny isn’t so important but instead its how funny you are; if you make a joke that can’t get a chuckle, don’t even think about attempting an offensive joke.

In film, an example of this would in the film Predator when the army men are in the helicopter. While the jokes weren’t nearly as offensive then, modern day audiences can still see that these are soldiers that are hyper-masculine and ‘roided out.

“Hahaha I Do That”

This is done by relating to the audience; that’s really it. Because it is very simple, most people who try their hand at humor – both the successful (Jerry Seinfeld) and those that are not (my dumbass) – use this kind of humor as it can be applied to most people in your audience. I did tried to show this in the script because people can have that one person in their life who only tells you what you know when you ask them a question.

Banter

Either way you look at it, the best way to achieve humor in any form of media is through banter. This is because the audience can be exposed to multiple different kinds of humor at once, but it also builds the characters in the banter through the reactions and the jokes made. The scene from Predator shows this as well.

Additional things

This is a video that goes through how to make jokes so. Yeah. Thought it’ll be cool.