According to (former) Onion Editor-In-Chief Scott Dikkers
- Irony – Intended meaning is opposite of literal meaning
- Character – Comedic character acting on personality traits
- Relatable – Common experiences that audiences can relate to
- Shock – Surprising jokes typically involving sex, drugs, gross-out humor, swearing
- Reference/Parody – Mimic a familiar character, trope or cliche in an unfamiliar way
- Hyperbole – Exaggeration to absurd extremes
- Wordplay – Puns, rhymes, double entendres, etc.
- Analogy – Comparing two disparate things
- Madcap – Crazy, wacky, silly, nonsensical
- Meta-humor – Jokes about jokes, or about the idea of comedy
- Misplaced Focus – Attention is focused on the wrong thing
Do you have a favorite "kind" of joke or is it more about the execution? Do you have a least favorite kind?
Do you agree with this theory of comedy or are there more types of joke?
Meta-humour Gang Meta-humour Gang. There's nothing funnier to me than a comedian dissecting comedy and the relationship between comedian/audience. Ones like Andy Kaufman, Tim Heidecker, Eric Andre, Norm MacDonald, and Bo Burnham have all used jokes as a weapon against their audience in a way that grows comedy. They have that modernist streak of the shock of the new. Everything else up there, except for layering irony, ends up staying comfortably within the existing boundaries of comedy.