Humour

Comedy relies on surprise, which relies on contrast and juxtaposition.

This photo contains several points of contrast, but which one makes it funny?

Photo of museum entrance with stone lion and two kids drawn in pretending to be lions and the lion has one illustrated eye open angrily looking

What contrasting feature makes this illustration funny? By Emma Traynor (Source)

Contrasts in this image include photo vs illustration and old vs young, but what makes it funny is the lion's eyeball.

This is a nice example of an image that has a visual punchline:

The main body of the photo is the setup: the museum, the kids playing out front, one pretending to be a lion, having fun and thinking he's cool.
The eye is the punchline, because the lion knows what they're doing and thinks they're annoying.

Here is a snippet that attempts a similar setup and punchline effect:

Someday you will beg for the honor of licking my feet. You will get down on your stupid, worthless knees and beg, "Please, sir! Please! Let me lick the diseased dog dung from between your toes." (I will be standing barefoot in the dung of diseased dogs—just to make it grosser for you.) And if I am in a good mood and am not too disgusted by your stupid, wormy tears or your stupid, scrunched-up face, I will allow you the signal honor of licking my feet clean. Even though you don’t deserve it.

But that’s all in the future. At the moment, I’m in the seventh grade.

I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President(2009)

The snippet has a long build up, and it creates an extreme point of view: someone who is going to ruin your life, make you beg and suffer, dominate you in every way.
Notice how it builds and builds in one direction in order to maximise the contrast in the reversal.
When the reversal comes, it's quick, to get that snap of surprise: this is a seventh grader!? 😂

Comedy and humour is hard to write on command, but we can use this idea of long setup plus sudden juxtaposition to get close.

Here are a couple of examples that use the same technique:

The beast ate Jakob whole. The captain screamed as the creature chomped down his legs, then his body and arms, and finally his howling head with a final satisfying crunch and gulp and spray of blood from between its teeth.

Huddled in the corner behind the bar, his heart hammering in terror, Mikolaj stopped recording the video. He was about to hit upload but then realised that, despite the circumstances, he should try to think of at least one hashtag.

He didn’t want to go through all this and miss the opportunity to trend.

We’ve never been held up but there was this one time that a meth head came in on a stolen BMX.

He’d nicked it in the parking lot because it wasn’t chained up properly, but some big dude saw and decided to go beast-cop and chase him down, and literally the only escape route was through the supermarket.

So this wiry guy ran in wearing nothing but shorts, thongs, and a surgical mask, jumped on the bike and started pedalling around the aisles, screaming and knocking stuff from the shelves onto the floor behind him like he was laying booby traps, while this other dude crabbed sideways along the ends, trying to cut him off.

People were shouting and videoing and calling the police, and it was total chaos until Ainsley dinged him with a tub of Vaalia and took him out. Ivan gave her a high-five for that one.

What is an extreme situation or attitude that would fit within the world you've been building in this lesson?
Start describing that and build it up as much as possible, take it as far as you can.
And then puncture it with whatever is opposite:
- I will dominate you... but I'm in middle school.
- I saw my captain get eaten by a monster... but I need to get on the FYP.
- Our store was turned upside down by a drugged-up bike thief... but my friend took him out with a tub of yoghurt.

Set up an extreme situation or attitude, then suddenly puncture it with the opposite.

You might have started to notice—as happened with the images at the start of the lesson—that when contrast and juxtaposition get heightened enough, they turn into open conflict.

It makes sense, right? A conflict is just someone trying to end a contrast.

So let's go home via Conflict Boulevard.

Contrast & juxtaposition