I enjoy surrealist humour projected into a realist background.
But I suppose it also stems from something I cant quite explain, something out of the expected, but not too far out; bordering the lines of lunacy but still structured enough to tickle me immensely.
Often this can be as subtle as the time I was watching an oldish justice league cartoon and The Flash and Lex Luthor swap bodies. Fairly straightforward stuff in a cartoon of this sort. What made me laugh was the image of The Flash, (as Luthor), standing round a table and telling everyone he has a plan, to which one of the replies was: "What are you going to do? Make everyone bald?!"
For some reason that cracks me up.
Of course there is also clever-but-not-really type of humour I enjoy as well as in that same episode Lex, (in The Flash's body still), shoots off into a bathroom and proclaims: "Well at least I can find out who The Flash really is." He takes off the mask...stares at himself in the mirror for a few seconds and then says: "I have NO idea who this is". To me that is both brilliant and bland but still very very funny.
Of course there is also anything Karl Pilkington says as evidenced by my signature. With him the humour comes not just purely from some of the ridiculous things he says, but also from the assumption that he believes what he is saying and doesn't intend it to be funny. Like his insane sounding idea of injecting an old lady in the head and she goes backwards in age after having lived a lifetime already and then dies as a baby like Benjamin Button. Or as a person dies...they have a baby growing inside of them and then the baby pops out as the person dies so each death results in a birth, which of course is pointless as we have a working reproductive system in place already.
Combined with the brilliant interjections and scenario's cooked up by Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais and occasionally I will be in tears while listening to their old podcasts.
Also I cannot forget his recollection of the various surreal and often downright bizarre people he grew up around. Such as: Miss Piggy, The lady with the bent neck, Shorts man, Uncle Alf, the lady with a bucket in a pram, Scruffy Sandra...and so on.
In the words of Ricky Gervais: "It's like fucking Narnia!"
But in general I enjoy rather random surrealist humour as well. I CAN enjoy slapstick surrealism in the form of weird facial expressions but that is more of a shared experience with my brother who finds this to be the pinnacle of humour, whereas I enjoy it....I think because he does. Or I enjoy his enthusiasm when he finds something that really tickles him and he plays it over and over.
Humour is interesting, of course, primarily because the second you dissect and try to explain a joke; it no longer holds any amusement. Like the idea of a granny going to get a series of organs swapped out to keep on going, it sounds humourous until you are holding the scalpel.
In this sense humour is best delivered like a successful emergency landing; whole and intact. Because then it is truely funny. I suppose I agree with [MENTION=16048]Pseudo[/MENTION] that it is derived from expectations.
But then again I wonder if you could examine your expectations. For myself I wish the world to be a strange, unusual place and it often is, but at the same time it is also endlessly banal, although this could just be the human brain's curse and gift of boredom.
The ability to shut out the fantastical nature of what is right in front of us....so that we can go and dance in our heads. In that sense boredom is our greatest creation and our mightiest ally.
Without it I dont think we would have progressed beyond poking at poo with sticks.
