What's Funny?

In Divine Comedy, we have a workshop at the beginning of every fall semester where our advisor, George Nelson, goes over what makes an idea funny. He narrowed it down to four categories:

Exaggeration:  Larger than life

Incongruity:  Unexpected combinations

Wit:  Surprising ideas

Recognition:  “Isn’t life just like that?”

I don't mean to be egocentric, I'm just drawing from what I know. At any rate, these are the categories that should cause us as human beings to laugh and find something funny. I'll probably be coming back to this post a lot as we go through scenes from Shakespeare to find out why they were funny and why Shakespeare wanted to use comedy.

Cheers!

-Whit