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In my experience, JVNs - at the very least - tend to be reliant on sit-com and manzai (someone saying or doing something silly and the other person pointing it out in an amusing way). The other common one is plays on language (kanji puns, misusing proverbs, etc) that don't translate into English and are thus usually missed or fall flat when translated. The vast majority of comedy in JVNs is sit-com, where the situation and its inherent absurdity provides the humor or the reactions of the characters do so. Japanese VN writers love tongue-in-cheek, though every once in a while slapstick will be dropped in to change the pace (slapstick was a lot more common twenty to thirty years ago in anime and manga than it is today, whereas sitcom was relatively rare... manzai is about the same, since it seems to be the undying genre of comedy in Japan, for whatever reason).