The key to gallows humor is to make the joke, no matter how certain the gallows is.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm a big fan of gallows humor. When my aunt passed away, she was in a coma for a day before my cousins pulled the plug. And the amount of joking and base humor that went on that day around her bed was so insane. It's crazy how people talk when something horrible is happening.
There's a bunch of different flavours of funny. It's all about the execution of it.
If you don't have humour, then you may as well nail the coffin lid down now.
Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny.
If you think something's funny, go with that. Most comedians pull jokes from a place of honesty.
When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.
A lot of my humor centers on the act of telling jokes and I think this can prevent certain audiences from suspending their feeling of disbelief. It might piss a few people off, but I can't help it.
I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation.
Anybody can make jokes. But unless they come from conviction, and there's truth in them, you haven't nailed it. They aren't as funny as they could be, and they don't make a point.