Comedy

[Jester]

The Evolution of Humor concludes that we laugh due to pattern repetition, or better put, unexpected changes in the pattern.

And old jazz man once told me that humour was about confounding expectations. Of course, he was talking about how to insert humour into the language of improvisation, but the logic is the same. You set up something that looks obvious, some kind of cliche, and the subvert it with something clever. Or, less subtly, you can do it backwards, creating the expectation of something complex or profound, and then delivering something unexpectedly simple, or even obvious.

-Jester