Our non-human animal friends are funny. Humans are funny too, but other animals are funnier. Members of that rarified subgroup occupy numbers 2, 10 and 14 on the list of the 51 Funniest Things.
To what do they owe this distinction? What makes animals so funny?
Turns out, a lot of things.
First, they embody at least two of the 11 Funny Filters (sometimes more, depending on what they’re doing): Madcap and Character.
They exude Madcap with all their physical comedy—the way they move, walk, and flip around. They look vaguely like us but are also different, so they’re recognizable but also strange. This mismatch tickles the funny bone as if they’re making wildly characterized funny faces.
They’re not as smart as we are, on the whole, so they’re nailing the Character Funny Filter with the Dummy archetype. Often, they’re a combination: the Dummy-Slob (a dog playing in mud), the Dummy-Trickster (a raccoon stealing garbage), the Dummy-Damsel (a kitten hanging from a branch), the Dummy-Naif (a turkey), even the Dummy-Jerk (a cat bitch-slapping a cat, dog, bat, or any animal). Depending on what kind of animal and what they’re doing, they can create almost any archetype hybrid.
Lastly, they know how to play it straight. Everything is deadly serious to them, which makes them as skilled as Leslie Nielsen in not breaking character.
Put it all together, and it’s comedy gold.
So true! Great application of the archetypes to different animals. One of the funniest things I ever saw as a kid was a scene in a documentary about African animals. A bunch of different species congregated around a certain fruiting tree. The fruit had fermented. When the animals gorged themselves it, guess what happened? Yep, they all got piss-drunk. I can still vividly recall rolling around, as an eight-year-old, in laughter.
Love it!