Anti-humor is a type of indirect humor that involves the joke-teller delivering something which is deliberately not funny, or lacking in intrinsic meaning. The audience is expecting something humorous, and when this does not happen, the irony itself is of comedic value. Anti-humor is also the basis of various types of pranks and hoaxes. It is considered to be very postmodern.
According to Anti-Joke.com, "[Anti-humor] is a type of comedy in which the uses is set up to expect a typical joke setup however the joke ends with such anticlimax that it becomes funny in its own right. The lack of punchline is the punchline."[1]
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The most common example of anti-joke is "Why did the chicken cross the road?" with the answer, "To get to the other side." The punchline is intentionally mundane. An example is:
The no soap radio joke, normally involves 3 people. Two people who know what the joke is about, and the third who is not in the know, or "the victim". The person delivering the punch line is deliberately unfunny but when the punchline is delivered the two people in the know react as if they have been told a very funny story, in order to pressure the person hearing the joke into pretending to find it funny. The true punch line comes if the "victim" also reacts as if the story was funny.
The shaggy dog story involves telling an extremely long joke with an intricate (and sometimes horribly grisly) back story and surreal or incredibly repetitive plotline, but ending the story with either a weak spoonerism (e.g.'Better Nate than lever!'), or abruptly stopping with no punchline at all. Versions of these jokes may take up to several minutes to tell. The Aristocrats is an adult version of this formula.
Other anti-jokes involve unexpectedly blunt and graphic punchlines shock humor or dark humor — which often reference death, infanticide and terminal illness. For example
In writing, it is common to put a period after the punchline of the anti-joke rather than an exclamation mark to reflect its dry and superficially non-humorous tone. Anti-jokes may rely on deconstruction of the joke, deriving comedy from the unexpected or inappropriate use of technical or circumlocutional language (crossing into meta-joke):
Anti-humor jokes are often associated with exaggeratedly bad stand-up comedians. One legitimately successful stand-up comedian, Andy Kaufman, had his own unique brand of anti-humor, quasi-surrealist acts coupled with performance art.
Ted Chippington's act contained non-jokes delivered in a Midlands monotone. Jimmy Carr is noted for his anti-humor style, anti-jokes being told with a straight face and very precise delivery. Bill Bailey is also noted for his particular brand of anti/meta-humor. John Thomson's stand up character, Bernard Right-on, would deliver set-ups to un-PC jokes (in the style of Bernard Manning), but confound the audience with tolerant, deliberately unamusing punchlines, eg. "A white man, a black man and an Indian walk into a bar. What a wonderful example of an integrated society".
Alternative comedy, among its other aspects, parodies the traditional idea of the joke as a form of humor.[2] Andy Kaufman saw himself as a practitioner of anti-humor. Other comedians known for their anti-humor are Ted Chippington, Jimmy Carr, Neil Hamburger, Tim Heidecker and Bill Bailey.
These anti-jokes rely on using widely known jokes which the audience is likely to have heard before. Instead of ending the joke in the usual humorous way, a mundane substitute is used, resulting in an anticlimax.
Some jokes derive humor from wordplay and puns. They are subverted through substituting the pun with an equivalent phrase with no such linguistic device, creating a cognitive dissonance with the superficial resemblance to the original.
Anti-humor sometimes manifests itself in poking fun at bad humor by the way of parody. An example is Jim's Journal, a comic strip by Scott Dikkers, co-founder of The Onion.
Other jokes rely on parts of a joke told in the wrong order or parts of different jokes told together, creating an effect similar to non-sequitur.
Nonsense jokes lack intrinsic meaning, and become funny simply because they are absurd.
Two Penguins were taking a bath. Suddenly, one of them said "Where's the Alarm Clock?"
Anti-humor and anti-jokes[3] is a kind of humor based on the surprise factor of absence of an expected joke or of a punch line in a narration which is set up as a joke. This kind of anticlimax is similar to that of the shaggy dog story [4] In fact, some researchers see the "shaggy dog story" as a type of anti-joke.[5]