Aristotle said that the key to good humor was expectation delivered on in a surprising way.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A girl walks into school. She goes to her locker, hopeful. Her expectations have been raised, courtesy of good behavior from her tormentors. She opens it up, finds the locker filled with blood and horror, then gets shoved in. Everyone laughs, nervously, but they do. The girl howls, screams, tries to escape, triggers, keeps trying to escape, then triggers again when no one helps her. Not exactly grade-A material, but what can you expect from high schoolers? Anyway, I don't like that story. Breaks my suspension of disbelief, requires a whole lot of things to go wrong, and it really falls off in the end. It's also more than a million words long, which is way too many for the punchline to be any good. Short and sweet is the key, right?

Here's another one. It's the same set up. Girl, high lowered expectations, locker. This time she punches her way out, takes a little nibble, then binges her way through half a dozen household appliances. Tens of thousand words later she kisses a different girl who had nothing to do with the joke, but that's alright because she did have something to do with the story. This one twists what you think you know, flips shit up down left right center and back, and it really doesn't care. This girl doesn't have anything to prove, and that's alright because the joke's not on anyone. It's just funny.

Anyway, the joke. One girl sees a cape. The cape hits her, then invites her very best friend over to talk about seeing her. The very best friend sees the girl, the girl sees her very best friend. The whole house of cards the very best friend has set up comes tumbling down as she tries to explain the to girl the whys and hows, tries to use the cape's paradigm to justify just how fucked-up she is. The cape demands an answer, the very best friend gives her one, and the girl dies.

Well, almost.

So. Humor. Expectation, unexpected fulfillment. Mess up either part and the joke falls flat, like an ice skater who fucks up a spin and throws his partner to the cold, or a clown without makeup, or sex without a condom.

See? See that? It wasn't funny. There was no lead up, just a dirty word thrown out, like pissing into the wind. Comedy's pyrotechnics, not lightning. It's an act, not improv. Hell, even the times it is improv there's hundreds of hours of practice behind it, free association and training on how to think and old references well-rehearsed and (if you're lucky) in-jokes that fall back into a well-worn rut of laughter. Call, response, like rallying in tennis but filled with social information that you can't just say straight-out, and it all has to seem like it comes off-the-cuff.

No wonder clowns drink.

(See? That one worked.)

What's our expectation? We have the very best friend, we have our cape, and we have our girl. We've got our Authority Figures, our Plucky Teenage Rebels, our Chaotic Evil Villains, our Big Bads, our Bigger Bads, and our Biggest Bad. There's an ensemble, a supporting cast, some more interesting than others, and a world on the brink. All that leads to patterns. The bad guys lose, the good guys win, and while something's lost, something's gained. It's a tale as old as time, and every time these caricatures show up everyone's ears perk up, good little doggies waiting for their treat.

Except that's not how the bad joke goes. We don't get a good guy, we don't get bad guys who matter, we don't even get comeuppance for half the wrongs, and the whole thing spins its gears until they damn wheels fall off. It's a bad joke because it shouldn't work, because it ignores half of the well-used tools that've been developed over the course of millennia, because the serpent stretches out for too long on too little, a tent of parchment-thin skin and tangled organs. Something lives in there, multiple somethings, but they're so lost in the rot that you have to laugh.

The good joke though, it's all in there. There's a bad guy who isn't so bad, a good person who really is that good, things lost which are worth losing, and the things gained are worth the hassle. It's a chandelier, it's a mosaic, it's a chuckle pure enough to shatter a wine glass, it's...

It's so clear it hurts to look at it sometimes.

The joke never loses itself to the pattern though. It goes through the motions because it makes sense, because the calendar inside measures out the right time, because its internal metronome naturally falls towards the most perfect tempo. It's not puppeteering, it's not acting out the scenes, it's acting straight-up. It feels natural, flows off-the-cuff, defines its own geometry, and never, ever shatters the illusion of effortlessness.

We've got our bad joke, the one that doesn't go anywhere in a twisted attempt to bite its own tail. We've got our good joke, the one that checks all the boxes without only checking all the boxes. There's an expectation, tweaked a little by the specific props in play and the lack of stagetech. There's something right there, in your head, taking shape, and that's the drawing board. I can twist it, paint it cherry red and neon green and chalk white, play off the levers everyone has that the patterns and jokes of old discovered by trial and error and observation, but it's still out of sight and Jackson Pollock was a hack.

That's the set-up. Two jokes, three girls of varying decency, and a whole fuckton of people in a jagged half-formed world. Expectations change as you name them, change as you acknowledge the acknowledgement, but that's there too, however fragile.

And all that's left is to execute.