Comedy
One of the best examples of the power of the rule of three is in comedy, where it is also called a comic triple. Two is the smallest number of points needed to establish a pattern, and comedians exploit the way people's minds perceive expected patterns to throw the audience off track (and make them laugh) with the third element.
The generic three-panel daily comic strip, and Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman, as well as "a blonde, a brunette and a redhead" jokes are some more examples of the rule of three in comedy.
Read more about this topic: Rule Of Three (writing)
Famous quotes containing the word comedy:
“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The difference between tragedy and comedy is the difference between experience and intuition. In the experience we strive against every condition of our animal life: against death, against the frustration of ambition, against the instability of human love. In the intuition we trust the arduous eccentricities we’re born to, and see the oddness of a creature who has never got acclimatized to being created.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)