Anti-humor (or anti-comedy) and anti-jokes^[1] (also known as unjokes) are a kind of humor based on the absence of an expected joke or punch line in a narration which is set up as a joke. This kind of anticlimax is similar to that of the shaggy dog story.^[2]

In anti-comedy the gist of the humor is in how poor the joke is or how poorly it was told.^[3] The humor derives from the subversion of the audience’s expectations of a familiar joke or joke structure. As it derives from an audience’s familiarity with the conventions of humor, it can be considered a form of metahumor, in that it is a joke that explicitly draws attention to the medium of joke telling and humor.

A common form of anti-humor involves a seemingly humorous setup leading to a non-sequitur “punchline” such as “No soap, radio” or deliberately subverts a conventional joke form such as: “A man walks into a bar. He is an alcoholic and it’s destroying his family.” Another form of anti-humor is poking fun at bad humor by the way of parody. An example is Jim’s Journal, a comic strip by Scott Dikkers, co-founder of The Onion, whose four-panel strips end without any sort of punchline. Alternative comedy, among its other aspects, parodies the traditional idea of the joke as a form of humor.^[4] Comedians known for their anti-humor are Tim and Eric, Norm Macdonald, Ted Chippington, Neil Hamburger, Jimmy Carr, Andy Kaufman and Bill Bailey.

Related posts:

1. Humor-of-the-Mind Humor-of-the-Mind Analysis:  Theory and Application . Robin Jaeckle Grawe ....
2. Computational humor Computational humor is a branch of computational linguistics and artificial...
3. Humor research publications Early publications Sigmund Freud: his 1905 book on jokes and...
4. Bilingual Humor and Translation from Don L. F. Nilsen Bilingual Humor and Translation from Don L. F. Nilsen Share...
5. Humor History from Don L. F. Nilsen HUMOR HISTORY FROM DON NILSEN Share and Enjoy: ...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.