Things are not always as they seem. Remember how Norman Bates seemed like such a nice guy? Well, you know the rest of the story. You can't just accept things the way they seem. You need to look at things differently, question everyone else's reality, and replace it with your own comedic view.

Reimagining Everyday Situations

You may see a man walking his dog, but maybe the dog is walking the man. Or, maybe it's a blind dog being led by a seeing-eye person.

Reinterpreting Famous Works of Art

Take a second look at famous photographs, ones you've seen a thousand times before: the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on VJ Day, the Beatles crossing Abby Road, Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera, and Bigfoot taking a stroll in the woods. How can you change those familiar photos and make them funny? Well, the Abby Road cover has been parodied by everyone from the Muppets to the Simpsons. In 1996, The New Yorker had a cover with a satirical parody of the VJ Day photo showing the sailor kissing another sailor, to address a political hot spot — gays in the military. Why not show Albert Einstein with a punk Mohawk showing off his tongue piercing?

Let's look at classic paintings — Grant Wood's American Gothic or da Vinci's Mona Lisa. How many times have you seen those? What if you changed Wood's painting to show the farmer standing alone with a slightly crazed look in his eye and just a trace of blood on the points of the pitchfork? Comedy writer Ernie Kovacs once showed the audience why the Mona Lisa was smiling: a cat was licking her foot.

Film Favorites

Look what Mystery Science Theater 3000 did with bad movies. They didn't accept them the way they were; they over-dubbed lines and made comments throughout every film, with hilarious results. Today, comedians are doing the same thing with the video mash-up, where two pop culture items are mashed together to make them funny. This may have started with short movie trailers shown on 1992's The Ben Stiller Show. One presented Eddie Munster getting revenge on the person who cancelled his show in the parody Cape Munster, and another was the Boy Scout version of A Few Good Men, called A Few Good Scouts.

Another great example of this was created by the Boston-based Emerson College sketch troupe Chocolate Cake City. In 2006 they combined Brokeback Mountain with Back to the Future and came up with Brokeback to the Future. In someone else's hands this could have been a disaster — just a one-word, one-note joke — but in the right hands it became an Internet masterpiece.