How the best stories make you feel good by hitting re-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat
Easter Eggs and the Best Black Mirror Moments
Black Mirror is a great work of art, and whenever people praise it they always compare it to the best episodes of the Twilight Zone. Top of the Black Mirror subreddit is a list of Episode Connections, or Easter Eggs: sly little nods and references across episodes.
I really admire the ingenuity and effort made to hide these little eggs: just visible enough to be spotted, but subtle enough you have to work for it to hunt them down. And that pinged the pattern bell in my head: Easter Eggs are another kind of callback.
Comedy Factoid: Callbacks = Funny
It’s a factoid in comedy that it’s funnier if the audience discovers the punchline themselves. Maybe that’s why we love and delight in the Easter Egg hunt; I watched Doctor Strange and saw a ‘hidden’ Easter Egg —and was very pleased with myself for spotting it.
A pattern I’ve been spotting in comedy is the idea of callbacks. Something repeated a few times can get funnier each time, especially if the unveiling is unexpected:
Q: How do you put an elephant inside a fridge?
A: I don’t know. How?
Q: You just open the fridge and put it in there. How do you put a donkey inside a fridge?
A: I know! You just open the fridge and put it in there!
Q: Nope! You open the fridge, take out the elephant, and then put the donkey in there, of course!
A: …of course
Q: Okay, okay. If all the animals went to the lion’s birthday party but there was one animal missing, which animal would it be?
A: The lion? Because it would eat all the other animals.
Q: No, it’s the donkey, it’s still inside the fridge.
A: …
There are better jokes out there; this one is a well-known golden oldie and open-source. But watching great stand-ups, they manage somehow to make a set-up and bring back the punchline from a previous bit back for an extra punch. Watch Joe Wong do it here (with extra pattern-pattern-break!):
It’s a pattern, again. The brain delights in discovering the similarity with the previous punchline, or even seeing the same punchline in a different context. Jimmy Carr says every joke is two stories, and the humour is the surprise at discovering your misunderstanding; a callback is simply two sets of two stories that aren’t so different after all.
There’s something wonderful, a beautiful mirror when we spot two elements of a subtle pattern. I’ve not got it down, but the brain likes spotting pattern, and being rewarded for being smart —we love it when we manage to successfully predict something, and it falls within expectations. It works even when it falls outside, but that’s for the Pattern Pattern Break blog — and why twist endings work so well and are so memorable.
Do you believe in patterns? Have you spotted my pattern of using alliterations throughout the article? It’s listed in Mark Forsyth’s excellent Elements of Eloquence book as one way to make memorable phrases. He takes his own advice — look at the title! — but catchy catchphrases have sprung up around repetition and pattern: Intel Inside. American Apparel. Guinness is Good for you. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
By the way — do you know the best way to cross a crocodile infested lake?
Q: You just get in the water and cross — the animals are at the lion’s birthday party.
