Kelly celebrates the release of Anne Libera’s new book on comedy, “Funnier.” The talk in front of a live audience at The Second City.

There’s a great line in your new book, “Funnier,” you write: “The real secret to creating good comedy is to start by creating comedy that is likely not good at all.” 

“This is the core value that I got from Second City, which is starting with improvisation and starting with taking a risk and starting with trying something. But beyond that, the other thing that I’ve learned both as a comedy teacher and as a comedy director and through the work I’ve done here at The Second City is that comedy is iterative. It is about making something and then trying it out in front of an audience. Good comedy is really an intersection of what you make as a comedian and an audience that finds it funny. Comedians go and work in front of audiences and purposely bomb over and over and over again in order to make sure that the work that they are making is the work that they really want to do. So, you’re always testing out what is working now because what is funny this year is not necessarily what is going to be funny next year.” 

One thing that is unique in the book is how you teach your students good comedy ethics. 

“You can laugh at something that you have lots and lots of psychological distance on like people who you see as lesser than you. Historically, let’s be clear, the comedy of the last, you know, 5,000 years has mostly been at the expense of marginalized and or the lower classes. You know, the kings really enjoyed watching that jester, who was someone that they got to beat up and that that was funny to them, right? The realization that comedy itself is amoral, does not mean that it cannot be used for good, but just because an audience laughs doesn’t mean it’s a good laugh.” 

It’s also interesting that there are so many links between comedy and the work we’ve done with behavioral scientists – which include things like recognition, error making, etc… 

“The line between what we think should be true and what really is true is where comedy lies. A pun is actually an exact version of that, right? Phyllis Diller has a joke:  ‘Light travels faster than sound, which is why some people seem bright until they speak.’ And it’s just the difference in the word ‘bright’ that is the key to that observation, as well as the fact that some people seem bright until they speak, which is also a recognition moment, right? But it’s kind of that simple. And the fact that we all make errors all the time and little tiny errors is a kind of pain that recognizing  that we all make those little errors also is valuable to us. It makes us know that what we see isn’t really the way the world works. And there’s some suggestion that this might be one of the original ways in which comedy and humor was valuable to human beings as we evolved is that it made recognizing our errors pleasurable through laughter.”