The Importance of Humour in Comedy

There are several devices that permit you to introduce a certain degree of what may appear anxiety producing but is buffered in very important ways. Take the clown figure. Clowns are really not like us. They're either too fat or too skinny and can do things like be hit on the head with a brick and then in a matter of seconds standing up and able to behave. So one thing you do is to assure that the figures are not really being hurt as is the case in slapstick comedy. Then of course the other feature that's very important here is that we have all kinds of conventions to signal that we're going to enter a zone in which people shouldn't be worried or anxious about