Jared Volle's video: Why Is Point-Of-View So Important In Comedy

Learn how stand-up comedians, improvisational comedians, and screenwriter's use Point-Of-View to create hilarious situations. Links to More POV Humor: http://creativestandup.com/why-is-point-of-view-so-important-in-comedy/ Joke Structures: http://creativestandup.com/how-to-write-stand-up-comedy-jokes/ How Jokes Work: http://creativestandup.com/how-jokes-work/ What Successful Comedians Do: http://creativestandup.com/3-pillars-of-comedy-success/ How Creativity Leads to Success: http://creativestandup.com/next-golden-age-stand-up-comedy/ In this video, we’re going to explore why POV plays such a huge role in comedy. I stumbled across so many great strategies for POV Humor while creating this video. But in this video, I want to focus on the big picture. So we’ll look at how POV Humor is different from conventional jokes and then I’ll show you the one rule that allows for POV Humor to be so effective and simple. POV humor, as I use it here, refers to a situation in which none of the characters are trying to be funny. The humor depends entirely on the listener’s POV. In standard jokes, the comedian uses setups to create safety and punchlines to create a violation. The juxtaposition between them is known as a benign-violation, or more simply, a Comedic Conflict. POV Humor is probably the most “naturally occuring” type of humor in the world because it’s so simple to use. It doesn’t require creating your own Comedic Conflict from scratch. The Comedic Conflict is often baked-in from the beginning. POV Humor is easily the tool that sitcom writers use to create humor. It’s an incredibly effective way of creating humor in a believable way. It doesn’t require any specific types of setups or punchlines. It doesn’t even require good structure or wording to be funny. That flexibility is what makes it so important in comedy. POV Humor works in almost the exact opposite way of a Broken Assumption joke. In a Broken Assumption, the setup line creates safety by leading the audience to make logical assumptions, expectations, or predictions. The PL introduces a violation, which then breaks one or more of the assumptions made in the punchline. You can watch our video on Broken Assumption jokes at CreativeStandUp.com. So Broken Assumption jokes require that the audience’s assumptions or predictions are incorrect for the joke to work. However, POV humor requires that the audience is able to understand and correctly predict or empathize with a someone’s POV. The assumptions the audience makes about a character must be correct or the humor won’t make sense. Take one of Bob Nelson’s characters, the “drunk guy hitting on a girl at the bar.” For the humor to make sense, the audience must be able to make correct assumptions about the drunken man. Knowing that the character is drunk allows the audience to make predictions about his behavior, but more importantly, it allows the audience to understand and empathize. If you changed anything about Nelson’s POV, the bit wouldn’t make sense. A sober person saying “I must be full” would be confusing. But we instantly understand how and why a drunk person might think that in a way that is entirely believable. This strikes at the very heart of Comedic Conflict. There’s a clear violation because the audience realizes the sentence doesn’t make sense. Spilling water on himself is what sets up the punchline, but the fact that the character is drunk is what really sells the entire joke. Without being drunk, there’s no safety. The audience wouldn’t be able to justify a sober person saying something that ridiculous, meaning there’s too much violation and not enough safety. If I had to boil everything down to one rule for great POV Humor, I’d say that great POV humor is about fully committing to a skewed reality. POV Humor is rarely about a funny person living in reality. A much more common and effective writing strategy is to pl ace a straight person in a slightly warped reality and allow the humor to arise naturally. This is what the improvisational comedy game “Let’s Make a Date” does so well. The game is setup like a typical dating game show, where a female contestant is trying to decide which bachelor to go on a date with by asking questions. This sets up a situation in which the only way to get a laugh is to use POV Humor. Conventional punchlines would fall flat because the audience judges everything they say based on the POV. If a line isn’t true to the character or doesn’t make sense based on what the audience knows, the joke will fail. It’s not that the character is a funny person. It’s that their reality and the audience’s reality don’t match up quite right, creating a Comedic Conflict from the very beginning. Read the entire article at CreativeStandUp.com