Milton Berle demonstrated this with a classic theatre experiment in the 1950s: if during a series of jokes you insert phrases that are not jokes, but with the same rhythm, the audience laughs anyway. What makes us laugh is the joke mechanism. To properly arrange the words in the sentence is also crucial to get precision.Main articles: Timing (linguistics) and Comic timing The joke's content (meaning) is not what provokes the laugh, it just makes the salience of the joke and provokes a smile.
He used as an instance a book by an English humorist, in which an elderly woman who desired a reputation as a philanthropist provided "homes within easy hail of her mansion for the conversion of atheists who have been specially manufactured for her, so to speak, and for a number of honest folk who have been made into drunkards so that she may cure them of their failing, etc." This idea seems funny because a genuine impulse of charity as a living, vital impulse has become encrusted by a mechanical conception of how it should manifest itself.To reach precision, the comedian must choose the words in order to provide a vivid, in-focus image, and to avoid being generic as to confuse the audience, and provide no laughter. French philosopher Henri Bergson has said in an essay: "In every wit there is something of a poet." In this essay Bergson views the essence of humour as the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living. These common rules are mainly timing, precision, synthesis, and rhythm.
The rules of humour are analogous to those of poetry.
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