Deadpan, dry humour, or dry-wit humour is the deliberate display of emotional neutrality or no emotion, commonly as a form of comedic delivery to contrast with the ridiculousness of the subject matter. The delivery is meant to be blunt, ironic, laconic, or apparently unintentional.
Etymology
The term deadpan first emerged as an adjective or adverb in the 1920s, as a compound word combining "dead" and "pan". The oldest usage recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary comes from The New York Times, which defines the term as "playing a role with expressionless face". An example of this usage is in a scene from the 1934 film The Gay Bride in which a gangster tells a man on the other end of a phone conversation to "give it a dead pan", so that the man does not inadvertently alert anyone else in the room as to the importance of what the gangster is about to say. The usage of deadpan as a verb is recorded at least as far back as 1942.
Examples
Early in his vaudeville days, Buster Keaton developed his deadpan expression. Keaton realized that audiences responded better to his stony expression than when he smiled, and he carried this style into his silent film career. The 1928 Vitaphoneshort filmThe Beau Brummels, with vaudeville comics Al Shaw and Sam Lee, was performed entirely in deadpan. The 1980 filmAirplane! was performed almost entirely in deadpan. Many popular American sitcoms use deadpan expressions to deliver dry humor, including Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, and My Name Is Earl. More recent examples are Andre Braugher as Captain Raymond Holt from the TV showBrooklyn Nine-Nine, Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing in Friends, Aubrey Plaza as April Ludgate in Parks and Recreation, Jennette McCurdy as Sam Puckett in iCarly, and Louis C.K. in Louie. Another example is the comedy of Steven Wright. Deadpan delivery runs throughout British humour. John Cleese as Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers and Rowan Atkinson as Edmund Blackadder in Blackadder are two notable exponents of dry, sarcastic wit from television sitcoms. The comedy troupe Monty Python include it in their work, such as "The Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch. In his various roles Ricky Gervais often draws humour from an exasperated sigh. For his deadpan delivery Peter Sellers received a BAFTA for Best Actor for I'm All Right Jack. While in his various guises such as Ali G and Borat, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen interacts with unsuspecting subjects not realising they've been set up for self-revealing ridicule; on this The Observer states, "his career has been built on winding people up, while keeping a deadpan face." Spice Girls member Victoria Beckham, is known for her dry wit. Dry humor is often confused with highbrow or egghead humor, because the humor in dry humor does not exist in the words or delivery. Instead, the listener must look for humor in the contradiction between words, delivery and context. Failure to include the context or to identify the contradiction results in the listener finding the dry humor unfunny. However, the term "deadpan" itself actually refers only to the method of delivery.
