Film Courage: What makes someone laugh?
Steve Kaplan, Author/Instructor/Script Consultant: That’s a physiological response. Some people think (some scientists think) that what happens is your brain is full of neurons and the neurons have created neural pathways and so the neural pathways that they’ve created help you go from if I ask you What’s your street address?, you tell me because that’s a neural pathway. When you or somebody says I dropped something the neural pathway says either I’ll pick it up or not my problem, you pick it up that’s a neural pathway. When you hear a joke, the joke is kind of fooling the neural pathway that it’s going to go down the same pathway and then it kind of creates a different neural pathway, which because the brain is based on electricity. As you can tell I’m not a scientist but there’s kind of almost an explosion that happens in the brain because it has to all of a sudden change gears, change directions. It’s literally creating a new neural pathway in the brain and that creates a physiological response where your air is being brought up and it comes out in laughter. We see this in babies, we see this in chimpanzees, this response where something is surprising but not dangerous. Laughter can be created but it’s based upon the fact that somebody has said something that is surprising yet in retrospect inevitable. If it’s surprising but makes no sense, you just kind of go Huh? If it’s not surprising then you’re just going to go Okay. If you’re creating a moment that’s both surprising yet in retrospect inevitable, that can create laughter and then go ask a neuroscientist…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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The Serious Business Of Being Funny
BUY THE BOOK – THE COMIC HERO’S JOURNEY:
Serious Story Structure For Fabulously Funny Films
BIO:
Steve Kaplan is the author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy and The Comic Hero’s Journey, best-sellers in their field. He’s working on a third book about writing comedy for television. In addition to having taught at UCLA, NYU, Yale and other universities, Steve created the HBO Workspace, the HBO New Writers Program and was co-founder and Artistic Director of Manhattan Punch Line Theatre. In addition to development projects for HBO, he has taught workshops online and around the globe and at companies such as DreamWorks, Disney Animation, Aardman Animation, and NBC’s Writers on the Verge. Steve has worked as a script consultant and script editor for productions companies, studios, directors and individual writers.
UPCOMING COMEDY INTENSIVE ONLINE CLASS WITH STEVE KAPLAN
Kaplancomedy.com/product/the-comedy-intensive-online-2023-spring
MORE VIDEOS WITH STEVE KAPLAN
CONNECT WITH STEVE KAPLAN
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