Stand up comedians

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Maybe I'm odd but I don't get the humour a lot of the times. I find myself trying to work out why something might be funny.

Usually due to sounding absurd (in normal conversation) but turning out to be ironically true or equivalent...

I'm the same and a lot of the time it depends on how fast their delivery is. I tend to have to deconstruct jokes to understand why they're funny and if their delivery is so fast that I don't have time to do this then I get frustrated. This recently happened with the film Deadpool - I had to turn it off after 15 minutes - that and the fact that the jokes just weren't funny!

I do like Stewart Lee as his jokes are long and complex and he wants you to have to work to get it. This suits me perfectly as I have to do that anyway.

A few comedians I really don't get but not based on speed of delivery. To me, they're just not funny:
* Frank Skinner
* Jo Brand
* Peter Kay
* Michael McIntyre
* Milton Jones

comedians are best when they are playing latino fathers on a sitcom, working for an aerospace company with angry midget mothers, an overenthusiastic wife, dyslexic son and troublesome teen daughter.

i don't watch stand up, but i think this segment by norm macdonald is pretty...amusing (to me). not least because the delivery is so dry.

I have no idea what any of this means



I'm afraid that Norm MacDonald is another that I'm going to have to add to my "list of comedians that I don't find funny". What was the funny part of that video? Was it that he pretended that he didn't know who Hitler was or that he said he had a Dell laptop when he was using an Apple? I did like his delivery though, nice and slow.

I guess this illustrates pretty well that humour's subjective

Here's a piece on Top Gear and offensive humour by my favourite comedian, Stewart Lee:

george lopez is a comedian. he had an ABC produced sitcom named...george lopez...which i liked better than his actual standup material.

those characters that i described. they are in the show.



yes. exactly.

Ah, we don't get that over here. I don't watch a lot of sitcoms but do like Spaced, IT Crowd, Black Adder and Black Books.



Oh well, at least I found the parts that were supposed to be funny, even though I personally didn't actually find them funny

I find most of them rude and obnoxious more than I do funny. It seems no one can be funny anymore, unless it's about sex...and even then it's not funny and makes them seem like they don't know how to tell a joke.

OHH my god I laughed until I cried, seriously, on that Norm MacDonald thing. Another person I find hilarious is Gilbert Gottfried.



My brother in law does not get humor either. I see this as a terrible disability. You would be constantly confused and irritated if you didn't get jokes.

I must have missed something because all I heard was someone who thought Hitler was still alive when it's obvious that he didn't really believe that at all. I know it's a hard thing to do but is it possible to explain why it's funny? Maybe it's a UK/US humour discrepancy but I'd like to try and understand



I couldn't listen to that video. His voice hurts my head!

Some of my favorite stand up comedians are George Carlin, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld, Janeane Garofalo, Bill Burr, Robin Williams, Jim Gaffigan, Mitch Hedberg, Steven Wright, Dom Irrera, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Iliza Shlesinger.

humor is incredibly subjective, yes, but what it mostly boils down to is subversion of expectations.

*the conversation starts off as a discussion of the weed slang "420". the guy spills his coffee on the laptop, which is mundane, but might be unexpected.

*norm and the other guy get different wikipedia results when looking up 420. (1) norm blames the different computer models, which as anyone who has even breathed in the same room as one should know, has no bearing on the search results you get and (2), norm says his computer is a "dell" WHEN YOU CAN CLEARLY SEE IT IS A MACBOOK AS WELL!!

*"odd-lookin duck". enough said. ever heard that term before?

*other guy tries to talk about weed-teens in the 70, bue keeps getting interrupted by norm describing hitler's physical appearance, of all things. not knowing that hitler is dead.

*"...died 50 years ago!"
"did he? i didn't even know he was sick."


i have to admit, none of this made me laugh either until the most recent time i watched it (just now), but that's what came to mind when you asked to explain what is funny about it.
it might just sound like a random clueless guy, but that on its own can be pretty funny to some. derivative of schadenfreude.

I usually laugh when the comedian is joking about something I can relate to. Like on the car ride to school today there was one talking about being lazy that I thought was really funny. But there's a lot of stand up comedy that doesn't make me laugh and even comes off as lame.

This might have been the guy I heard talking about being lazy. Jim Gaffigan. I think he's pretty funny. I like the fact he never uses profanity.



However I can only listen to so much of this stuff before it becomes tedious to me.

I thought that was what was supposed to be funny about the sequence but wasn't sure as several people found it hilarious but it just didn't work for me. I thought I must have been missing something.



I'd not heard of it either and had to look it up.



Got that, but didn't find it funny. I also thought it may have supposed to have been funny because he he said "I like a Dell" which almost sounds like "I like Adele".



No, as far as I can remember, I've never heard it before. Is that phrase inherently funny or was it just because of the deadpan delivery?



Again, I got that but didn't find it funny.



Now, this made me chuckle a little as it reminded me of Spike Milligan's epitaph "I told you I was ill!" Now, there's a funny man!



Ah, schadenfreude. So rather that the usual definition of laughing at someone's misfortune, we're supposed to laugh at his stupidity, which is a type of misfortune, I guess (the misfortune of being born stupid)?

Thanks so much for explaining it to me and now I can safely say that Norm MacDonald probably isn't for me. Yes, humour is most definitely subjective

Another point about humour. I find that I don't like most "comedy" films for two main reasons:

1) I think that humour seems to work best over a shorter period than 1.5 hours, possibly because I find longer comedies tiring, so I like TV comedy series with 30 minute episodes more than the usual film comedy. A case in point, The Inbetweeners TV series was so much better than either of the films.
2) Most comedy films that come out nowadays, at least American ones, seem to have a juvenile, lads together, fart type humour which I don't find funny. A friend told me to watch "The Hangover" and "Superbad" - I hated both of them.

This isn't to say I don't like comedy films but they have to be something special (Life of Brian, Withnail & I, Spinal Tap, Young Frankenstein, Four Lions, Gregory's Girl).

That was pretty funny! I especially liked the part about families gathered around watching the radio

I know there's a lot of gamers on here, so I thought some of you may find this funny. I find it hilarious as it echoes my experiences of playing video games - I had exactly the same problem with GTA4