comedy

An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.

A short clip of Stephen Fry explaining the differences between American and British comedy. He attributes them to cultural attitudes such as optimism versus pessimism.

A Blackadder the Third scene in which Dr Johnson delivers his dictionary, which lacks Blackadder's invented insults such as contrafibularity.

Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.

A comedy sketch of a business meeting in which an engineer, the expert, is asked to do impossible things like draw red lines with blue ink.

Matt Parker's stand-up routine about spreadsheets, taken from the Festival of the Spoken Nerd DVD Full Frontal Nerdity. It features Excel used in unexpected ways, including turning an image into a spreadsheet.

A CBC satire sketch in which a self-proclaimed thought leader gives a talk full of empty gestures and nothing-saying inspiration. It parodies TED-style conference talks.

A satirical CBC Radio This Is That sketch profiling a Vancouver artisanal firewood company that sells bundles of kindling for $1000.

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

A Nathan For You sketch in which Nathan Fielder tackles customers' privacy fears at computer repair shops with an awkwardly absurd business solution. It is a comedy clip from the Comedy Central show.

An HBO special in which Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK discuss the craft of stand-up comedy. They talk about writing jokes, technique and how they handle old material.

A nine-minute Stewart Lee stand-up routine about political correctness and the claim that it has gone mad. It is dry, layered British comedy that takes the complaint apart.

A Mitchell and Webb sketch in which two German soldiers realize their uniforms carry skulls and wonder whether they are the baddies. It is a short comedy bit about people failing to see themselves as the villains.

A comedy song by Garfunkel and Oates in which both play the same woman at 29 and at 31, charting a swift slide in her romantic prospects.

A classic Bob Newhart comedy sketch in which a therapist's only advice to a patient is to 'stop it'.

A short sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look in which the characters cheerfully propose a drastically callous solution to poverty. It is dark satirical comedy about cold policy logic.

A Chappelle's Show sketch in which drug dealer Tron Carter and a white businessman face the justice system in very different ways.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Buster Keaton's visual comedy, examining how he built and framed his gags. It uses clips from his silent films to show the thinking behind them.

Norm Macdonald's 2015 appearance on Letterman's final Late Show, delivering a deadpan bit about Germany and its military history. Jerry Seinfeld reportedly called it Norm's best joke.

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter visit Google's Mountain View headquarters in 2010 for a comedic Q&A. Conan jokes with the interviewer and the Google audience.

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

A Fry and Laurie sketch about language, full of absurd phrases and wordplay, which also plays on the distinction between langue and parole.

The Rubberbandits perform "Horse Outside", a comic Irish song about a horse waiting outside, from the RTE show Republic of Telly.

A stand-up routine by Stewart Lee on political correctness, offering a satirical defense of inclusive language.

An SNL sketch in which Nick Burns, the condescending IT guy, trains a new tech support hire to mock users over simple computer problems.

A classic Clarke and Dawe sketch from 1991 in which an Australian senator evasively discusses an oil spill, famously saying the front fell off.

A one-minute clip from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which revolutionaries grudgingly list everything the Romans have done for them, from roads to clean water. It is a satirical sketch about refusing to credit a disliked group.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

A sketch from A Bit of Fry and Laurie, season 1 episode 4, featuring a 'Doctor Tobacco' routine.

In a New York Times interview, Jerry Seinfeld describes the anatomy of his Pop-Tart joke, still a work in progress, and shows his longhand writing process.

A short scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which a Roman centurion cannot keep a straight face over the name Biggus Dickus.

The classic Monty Python sketch in which a customer tries to return a dead parrot to a pet shop owner who insists it is only resting.

A Key & Peele sketch in which two friends keep misreading the tone of each other's text messages while making plans.

A Key & Peele sketch in which an inner-city substitute teacher, Mr. Garvey, keeps mangling the names of his middle-class students during attendance.

The pilot of the British comedy series Look Around You, a deadpan parody of 1970s and 80s school science programmes, in which the scientists examine calcium.

Super Eyepatch Wolf analyzes why The Simpsons declined after its golden age, pointing to changes in the writers' room and a shift in the style and complexity of its comedy.

Comedian Rob Paravonian's 'Pachelbel Rant', a comedy bit showing that the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon underlies countless pop songs. This is a high-quality 2019 re-post of the 2006 original.

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

Reggie Watts performs at TED 2012, blending vocal looping, beatboxing, poetry and comedy across musical genres in a larger-than-life improvised set.

A full-length recording of Tom Lehrer's 1967 concert in Copenhagen, mixing his satirical songs with spoken comedy between numbers. It runs about 51 minutes with good audio for its age.