Learning to Crack Successful Jokes

Jokes are of different types. While it is a special skill to be able to crack jokes, the benefits of jokes in personal and social life cannot be underestimated. Among various types of jokes, one of the popular ways of association is bringing out incongruity. In other words, this means pairing opposites or contrasting situations or people. For instance, most comedy scenes adopt this strategy where the comedies built inside the stories replicate the course of action of the mainline story of the movie in a lighter and comic tone. The comedian trying to imitate the hero under a given situation miserably fails and ends up creating laughter.

New jokes can be crafted by associating similarity or congruity. In this method, putting the objects of similarity engenders laughter. One of the examples here could be to present an identical pair of people or twins wearing the same clothes. This will obviously appear odd or even funny to other people. The normal response could be that people would either cast a strange look or giggle besides making some cheeky comments.

Cartoonists widely make use of this strategy of associating similarity to spawn number of funny doodles. Accomplished cartoonists can draw people looking like animals or represent two totally unrelated objects look similar. For instance, one of the popular representations of this kind is the picture of a garden hose partly hidden by the plants and appearing as a snake.

Caricature is one of the art forms in cartooning that makes use of the technique of congruity. In this method, the image drawn does not exactly represent the person, but presents an exaggerated version of his image, generating a great amount of fun. Caricatures are often used to produce intellectual laughter wherein the features distorted in the image highlight some message about the person driving home what the author wants to convey about him.  In addition to the visual representation, this art form also gives rise to several verbal humours.

One of the most interesting and popular form of verbal humour is punning the words. In this method, the humour is achieved by manipulating the different meanings of a given word or sending a message through two homonyms or similar words. Double entendre is another type of verbal humour where an expression or word has a double meaning. Usually, the second meaning is risque. In several ways, similarities are thus used in a creative way to achieve comedies.