Comedy and creativity (Knock, knock...)

What's your favourite joke? Please share in the comments.

A friend recently shared this article from The Atlantic on kids and jokes.

It reminded me that jokes are an important part of the human experience. But what a lot of people don't realise about jokes is that they can also be a measure of mental health, and they are markers of creativity in people.

I'm gonna talk about the relationship between jokes and creativity.

I spent much of my theatre life as a comedienne, and I served my senior internship in a comedy theatre. Also, as a Film Studies major, I studied a lot of 20th Century comedy. Jokes are a staple of human comedy. There are people who make a living from telling jokes. (I don't know if I want to be one of them; comedy is hard work.)

A joke relies on a creative play on words or a juxtaposition of two things (situations, etc) that aren't necessarily the first logical step.  To understand (but not necessarily appreciate or even like) a joke involves thinking outside the square.

This requires a degree of creativity.

I refer to creativity as the human method of creating new meaning out of existing material. I'm not just talking about someone painting a picture or writing a song. Human creativity is problem-solving. It's the taking of elements (like music chords) or clues (why are there only six cookies left in the cookie jar, and why isn't my normally voracious six-year-old not eating his dinner?) and working something out. Creativity is me at work figuring out how to reduce our paper usage by over half.

What have you made that wasn't there before? Creativity is the process you used to create it. How you strung your thoughts together to come up with a solution, whether it was a painting or a print server, this process of stringing thoughts together is creativity.

Jokes rely completely on this. Jokes enable us to see things in different lights. Jokes get us thinking.

Take the joke: "How do you get down off an elephant?" The first logical step is that this sentence implies how do you, sitting on top of an elephant, debark to the ground?

The punchline, "You don't. You get down off a goose," requires further thought. What does a goose have to do with debarking from an elephant?  Nothing.  The word "down" isn't used as an adverb, but a noun. Goosedown is a form of feathers. Elephants, lacking feathers, do not have down. You cannot get down from an elephant. You can, however, harvest down from a goose. You can get down off a goose.

To explore this cleverness in wordplay (an adjective vs a noun interpretation of the word 'down') requires creativity.  (You don't have to like a joke to be able to appreciate its logic. Liking or disliking a joke is purely a matter of taste.)

Creativity is a key skill in problem-solving. It allows you to look at what's present, and extrapolate what's not there (but could be).

If you're the sort of person who often says, "I don't get it," when you hear a joke, you may wish to explore your creative process. Ask people to tell you jokes. If you don't understand, fear not to ask them to explain it. The more jokes you hear, the better you'll get at getting them. Start here.

Don't be surprised if you one day discover you're better at solving problems, all because you listen to jokes.


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Her Grace asks, "What's brown and sticky?"  A brown stick.