Library / Anti-Humor
Reference Guide
What Is Anti-Humor?
Anti-humor deliberately disrupts the audience's expectation of a conventional joke. Instead of a satisfying punchline, the lack of one—or the wrong one—becomes the comic mechanism.
Why it works
Comedy depends heavily on expectation. Anti-humor makes that expectation visible and then refuses to fulfill it in the normal way.
Absurdity and anti-humor
The two can overlap when a work commits seriously to an irrational premise. EW uses a related strategy by making the limitation of its premise impossible to ignore.