It won’t be long until the funniest and most shocking things people say and write won’t contain profanity, double entendres, allusions to bodily functions, or references to private body parts.
Why will that come about? Because it is normally one of three things that causes something to be considered humorous:
It’s unexpected
It’s hyperbolic (a subtype of ‘unexpected’)
It’s profane (also serves the dual purpose of being shocking)
In other words, as to #1 (It’s unexpected), a yarn being spun may cause you to assume one thing is going to happen, but then something else entirely is sprung on you, e.g., Dave Barry wrote about how he had wanted a dog for years, but his wife Michelle decidedly did not. Once their daughter was born, it turned out that she was a great animal lover and also earnestly wanted a dog from quite a young age. Barry wrote this about the situation:
So now I had an ally. Now Michelle was constantly hearing a nagging, whining voice: “Please can we get a dog? Please please PLEASE??” There was pouting and sulking. Sometimes there was sobbing and screaming, and floor-pounding tantrums.
That was all from me.
You were assuming all that carrying on was from the young daughter, right? So when Dave adds, “That was all from me,” it's pretty funny. YMMV—maybe you saw it coming, and so the punch line didn’t have pack much of a punch, after all, but it made me laugh out loud.
Another type of humor that uses something unexpected is when one thing in a list is jarringly out of place with the other items in the list. Although not necessarily intended to be humorous, an example is those sets of images young children are shown in school, where they are asked to select the picture that doesn’t match the others; e.g., the set of images may consist of an apple, an orange, a peach, and a duck-billed platypus. Another example, this time being used in a deliberate attempt at humor, is somebody ordering their meal at a restaurant and telling the waitperson: “I’ll have the escargot as an appetizer, a filet mignon done medium-rare, a glass of your best Cabernet Sauvignon, and a PopTart” (the Cabernet Sauvignon clashes with the other items, as it doesn’t pair well with PopTarts).
As for #2, hyperbole being humorous, here are two examples from Mark Twain, with both being taken from his book Life on the Mississippi (although you could find many similar examples in any of his books):
I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot, and could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far.
And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what couldn’t he do if he was dead!”
As for #3, profane things being funny, this is, of course, a matter of opinion (just as the use of hyperbole and unexpected things may not strike some as funny). You pretty much have to admit, though, that such things are considered mirthful by many, at least at some point in their lives.
As evidence of this, quite a few young children titter and burst into laughter when a “naughty word” is spoken, or when one of them makes scatological references or sound effects.
Mark Twain inserted a tongue-in-cheek poem into the newspaper where he was apprenticing as a printer back in the 1840s. It was considered shocking because he addressed his verse “To Miss Katie of H--l.”
The “H--l” was ostensibly meant to be a shortened form of the name of Twain’s (and Miss Katie’s) hometown of Hannibal, but it was also intended to bring into the reader’s mind “To Miss Katie of Hell.” Thus, it was considered funny because it hinted at the profane, and was for this reason at least somewhat shocking.
That H--l seems quite tame now, and moderns may marvel that it was ever considered profane or shocking at all, but at the time Twain wrote it, the explicit expansion of “H--l” to “hell” would not have been allowed in print. Even the “H—l” was described as “spicy” and frowned upon by the newspaper’s editor (Twain’s older brother Orion), who demanded an immediate cessation of such tomfoolery.
So we see that cheap thrills and easy laughs that accrue to the jokester from using profanity, or even alluding to it, is nothing new. Many never grow out of this sort of fascination; bathroom and sexual humor never go out of style for some.
Regardless of your view of that (you might be thinking I’m an old fuddy-duddy, or think I’m a double duddy just for using that old-fashioned word), I wrote the foregoing as a prelude to this:
Using profanity, even the most shocking of words and phrases, and references to sexual matters, has become so common that the use of such is no longer shocking. And so, I submit that the days of profanity being considered humorous are numbered, because they have lost their shock value and are no longer unexpected. In fact, such speech (and writing) is now so commonplace and taken for granted that they barely register.
Those who want to shock (and every rising generation goes through a phase when that is their aim) will need to take the opposite tack and completely refrain from all such. If they were to do so, it would eventually sink in to the hearer/reader that “something is off”—there’s no gratuitous profanity sprinkled willy-nilly through the conversation or on the page. They might even be tempted to say, “What the H—l is going on here? Where’s the profanity?”
Soon now, the funniest thing of all will be for the aspiring humorist to refrain from using foul language and the like (since it’s expected, and humor thrives on the unexpected); it won’t be long before the most hilarious and shocking story a person could write will be one that would have been considered tame and overly “square” or strait-laced only a few decades ago.