The physics of being funny

For a silent comic, Jos Houben sure does talk a lot. He’s fascinated by what’s funny, and for him that’s fundamentally physical. “We don’t have bodies,” says Houben, a gangly 49-year-old Belgian who performs physical comedy and has been teaching it at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. “We are bodies. Our deepest sensations—of gravity, of emotions—express themselves physically. Our brains, our nervous systems strive after regular patterns. But those patterns can trip us up.” And when we do trip up, the result is funny.

Take the art of walking. It’s a simple pattern of putting one foot in front of the other that everyone has mastered. “But once you master something,” Houben says, “you fall asleep to it. When you stumble, the pattern is broken. In that little existential moment, you realize, ‘Hey, I’m here!’” Which explains why the pratfall—a man slips on a banana peel or falls down an open manhole—is one of the oldest and funniest gags in silent comedy’s joke book.

Laughter is, in Houben’s words, “a liberating agent.” It frees us from the deadening patterns of routine by briefly suspending the law of gravity. “Laughter does not want to be described or defined,” he says. “It can never be written down or understood through language.” It is better understood through the universal language of the body, through our common experience of being creatures that walk upright but repeatedly fall flat on our—smiling—faces.