A study out of the University of Colorado at Boulder has corroborated the idea that there is inherent incongruence in some comedy. A lot of comedy in fact. The study did so by asking a sample group of participants to consider scenarios such as a man marinating or having sex with a chicken carcass before cooking it, and determine which would be more comical. The fact that neither of these scenarios would make for very good comedy is not all that important, we are supposed to believe. It should be noted that the incongruence theory has been around since at least Artistotle.

Gorilla Catcher – Farmingdale, New York, 3-6-2010

A man wakes up in the morning, he has breakfast, and he notices that there is a gorilla in the tree in the front yard.

‘Son of a gun,’ he thinks. He gets out the Yellow Pages and he finds an ad for a licensed gorilla catcher. He calls the number, and an hour later a man shows up at his house with a gun and his dog Blue.

‘What I do,’ the gorilla catcher explians, ‘Is I climb up to the top of the tree and shake the branches. When the gorilla falls out, my dog Blue will jump into the air and grab it right in the jewels. Then you can shoot to maim, and we capture it.’

The man nods in assent, and the catcher climbs up the tree. Halfway up he slips, and as he falls to the ground he yells, ‘Shoot the dog! Shoot the dog!’

The History of Comedy, Part 1

We are collecting stories now about the best comedians, variety performers and stage musicians in the 1940s and 1950s. They will appear on this site as part of an ongoing project to restore a segment of the history of comedy in America, which has grown from song and theater performance, to early film, to vaudeville and the variety show, to the varied and rich forms of comedy today, which include stand-up, performance, the television script, improvisation, and alternative forms of comedy that are continuing to emerge.

You are welcome to email your stories, suggestions or memories of the comedians and performers who made an impression.