Claiming something isn't funny is a difficult claim to support, especially when people are laughing. Concepts regarding humor are ambiguous at best. As the world changes, or the people in it change, humor adapts. There are many jokes which are mean spirited, offensive, and/or damaging that still make certain groups laugh in certain situations. So for me to call said "joke" unfunny is only partially correct. It's unfunny to me, and possibly to anyone with a basic understanding of human integrity. But there are always going to be assholes who laugh at inappropriate things, some of whom make very comfortable salaries doing so. That's a topic beyond the scope of my ability as a blogger.
Instead, I'm here to discuss the merits of joke telling; the inner rhythm and timing that makes a joke succeed or fail. Everyone has a sense of humor, but not everyone can tell a joke. I've known many people who are convinced they have great senses of humor because they've found a small panel of humor buttons to push repeatedly. And yes, they may be getting laughs from their peers, but they still fail at humor. My goal is to explain why. To you who are reading this, I hope you come away with a new appreciation for the complexity that is humor, or at the very least confirmation of what you've already figured out.
Let's look at some examples of failure.
1. "That's what she said".
May as well start with the most obvious one. This is the commoners version of "The Aristocrats", with its punch line that brings nothing to a joke that has already run its course. You know the ritual. Literally anything that can be taken as a sexual innuendo, something as simple as "This is hard!", is followed by a near automatic response of "That's what she said."
First of all, the joke doesn't even work on its own; you have to have already heard it to get it, otherwise you're looking around the room trying to figure out which 'she' is being quoted. But the heart of the problem is that this joke requires absolutely nothing out of the person who says it. No cleverness. No creativity. It's merely a line said on cue, like the person who says "Who's there" after being given the traditional "Knock knock" setup. I mentioned earlier the concept of pushing a button. Humor requires effort. There's no effort in pushing a button. But the "that's what she said" joke tellers are trying to take undeserved credit, as if it's unexpected that the doorbell keeps ringing every time they press the buzzer.
Automatic response humor is never funny. Here are a couple of non-innuendo examples that come to mind. One, you've just told an actual joke. It may not be a particularly funny one, but it's recognizable as a joke with at least a minimal amount of effort behind it. Someone in your audience responds, not with a laugh or even a groan, but by deadpanning the onomatopoeic phrase "ba dum tsss". They're only acknowledging they get that you've told a joke, but clearly don't find it funny enough to give you a real reaction and are trying to one-up you by implying your joke wasn't funny. (A justifiable exception here is when someone accidentally tells a joke without realizing it, and the "ba dum tsss" draws attention to it. Inclusiveness is the key).
A second example is a misuse of riff humor in daily life. Picture this: you and your passenger have just gotten out of your car. Doors shut. Lock. Keys still in the ignition. A spoonful of stress wells up in you and spills out of your mouth. "Damn it!" you mutter. "Janet," your passenger responds. Now all you can think about is your tightening fingers around the throat of someone who, until that moment, had been dear to you. Mystery Science Theater 3000 gets a pass on this, as they write around nine hundred jokes for an hour and a half; even the lame ones are acceptable. And (this is the point) the movie isn't in that moment with them. It can't respond to the needling or ill-timed thoughtlessness.
Automatic response humor is thoughtless. "That's what she said" is the worst offender because it combines thoughtlessness with the easiest, most obvious joke in the adult lexicon, "Gur! That could have been taken more than one way! Huh huh!" I encourage everyone, the next time one of your co-workers responds to anything with "that's what she said," to outwardly fly off the handle. "What?! WHO said that? That is inappropriate workplace conversation! I want names! Of everyone who has ever undermined this company's integrity!" Yes, you'll look like a dumbass, but it's worth it to smother out this monster.
2. "That sounds like a personal problem. That's all I'm saying."
This is practically the same situation, although personal problems range from sexual to psychological. So I can at least grant that it's a step up from "that's what she said" in versatility. I knew a girl who I'm going to call Fred, because that's obviously not her real name. This whole phrase became Fred's mantra in group conversations. Being around her was the equivalent of being at a taping of Full House with a guaranteed reaction from the audience. It didn't matter what the set up was, anything could sound like a personal problem to her. "My throat's sore, I'm having trouble swallowing," and "I can't make change for a dollar," are on two very different points of the logistics spectrum, but either one could be followed by "that sounds like a personal problem" *laugh track* "that's all I'm saying" *precisely same laugh track*.
Two things going on here, and I'm going to work backwards through them. "That's all I'm saying" has no meaning. Fred just wanted twice the laughter for one joke, and she knew she could get it by cueing the audience. "That sounds like a personal problem" as I mentioned is similar to "that's what she said". But there's a subtle difference.
"That's what she said" is the mantra of people who have never tried to understand humor, i.e. people who aren't, and never will, be funny. "That sounds like a personal problem" is an actual joke. It's not a good one. In fact, it's an incredibly lazy one. But it is a joke. And it illustrates a curious phenomenon in the spectrum of humor, namely how the way an audience perceives the jokester has an effect on their reception of the joke.
Fred was the 'funny friend', and it took her a certain amount of Monty Python recitations and spotlight hogging to achieve that status. And having been established as the 'funny friend', Fred no longer had to try so hard to get laughs. Fred was well liked. You were used to laughing when she spoke, so in essence all she had to do was cue you. "That sounds like a personal problem" was your cue. It's effective in certain circles, and it's dreadfully lazy.
I haven't seen Fred in at least a decade, so for all I know she may still be getting laughs with the minimal effort. But I expect she at least has encountered a higher class of humor on more than one occasion, made up of people who notice immediately that she's not bringing her A-game. That group only gives courtesy laughs to children. Adults who deal out the "that sounds like a personal problem" card are met with blank stares. If you've ever tried doing standup, that reaction is worse than being heckled. It's eerie. Especially coming from people who understand humor better than you. When you get those looks (and you'll intuitively know) take them seriously. That's your crossroads. You need to decide if you're going to swim with the bigger fish or go back to the comfort of your little pond. But the bottom line is, you're failing.
3. "You're very punny! You deserve a 'round' of applause."
One of my college school mates only knew these two jokes, and they were told often, and always in succession. The 'round' of applause (if I need to point it out) was accompanied by the visual aid of golf clapping in a longitudinal air circle. Get it? Of course you do, because you're not three.
Generally speaking, puns are not funny. Now if you knew me in my teenaged years, you would be correct in screaming "hypocrite" at me right now. I was all about puns in high school and college. Hell, it was the only way I knew how to connect most of the time. Were they funny? Generally no. Did anyone ever think to mention that to me? Oh, you bet! Ask yourself if it stopped me. Go on. You know the answer.
Here's my defense of puns. It's not about being funny or not, it's about a phase. Particularly in adolescence when you're figuring out who you're going to be for the rest of your life, your awful pun phase is the wax on/wax off exercise that trains you to do real karate down the road. You're learning a skillset without realizing it.
One, you're experiencing what it feels like to lose your audience. Watch any late night comedian, you'll catch them at a moment where they lose their audience. But they have a whole arsenal of ways to dance back into the hotspot. Every single one of them got that skill through years of failing.
Two, you're training your brain to think like a comedy writer. If I say "there was a meltdown at the plant", you're automatically processing the alternate definitions of the words in the sentence to see if there's a surreal way of putting them together (instead of asking if everyone got out all right, you horrible person). Wordplay is the stew mix of comedy. Too much of it may give off the wrong flavor, but it's an indispensable ingredient.
And three, you will eventually get one that lands. Your audience (and if you're still doing puns, 'audience' means peers) who normally takes joy in chastising you like Charlie Brown's classmates are suddenly covering their mouths and turning their eyes away so as to deny that this one time you said something that was actually funny. On purpose. You're cooler than they are.
This is the moment when one of them plays an egregiously amateur move by trying to connect with your hard work by calling you 'punny' and topping it with their handography. Um, no. You're not funny. And the fact that I was just now, doesn't grant you the privilege of riding my coattails. You're only emphasizing the fact that you will never pull off what I just did. Because you haven't failed as many times as I have.
4. The exclamation point
Let's just start with an example. Pretend I'm submitting my author's bio for The Carousel, because I'm sure by now that book is more than fifteen percent done. "I was partially inspired to write the book in 2008 while working at the library, regularly walking past rows of fiction authors and thinking how amazing it would be to have my name among them. At that point I only got a few chapters in before temporarily shelving the project. If there's one thing I learned at the library, it's how to shelve!"
*sigh* It's okay, you can grind your teeth. I know I am.
To be fair, written humor has two immediate disadvantages to the more familiar spoken format. You have no control over timing, and no inflexions. From that perspective, I understand why people try on the exclamation point for punch line 'punch'. So much of humor is nuance, and the typed word is sorely limited. I don't think there's a really good solution forthcoming.
Here's the thing though, let's examine the Muppets. The Muppets are really funny. And they're really emotional. And with few exceptions, their expressions are limited to mouth closed and mouth open. Jim Henson himself always warned incoming writers that the puppets could do about ten percent of what they needed to do, but they managed to overcome those obstacles. With a certain amount of creativity, solutions present themselves. Maybe not all-purpose solutions, but there are usually ways to work up an arsenal of workarounds.
Hopefully in this blog I've made you smile at least once. Assuming so (I have such a high opinion of myself), then that at least proves it's possible to crack the challenges of the written word. And if I haven't connected with you, why don't you do a Google search for Jack Handey? That should get the point across.
Not every joke works in every format. You can't really 'tell' a sight gag. Likewise, I'm sure you've read many a children's joke book containing such attempted zingers like "Q: What's the best time to go to the dentist? A: Two thirty (tooth hurty)". The fact that the joke requires a parenthetical explanation only emphasizes the incompatibility of the outlet.
In the case of the exclamation point, it only draws attention to the lack of 'punch' in the punch line. Now I'm not talking about dialogue, where characters are raising their voices for whatever reason; exclamation points are often vital in conveying that nuance. But in cases where you personally are the omniscient narrator, your exclamation points for comedic support turn you into Fozzie Bear, and your reader into Statler and/or Waldorf. Don't do that to yourself.
5. Anything on Saturday Night Live that has been said more than once
Ah, catch-phrase humor. I think every successful comedy writer has a tolerate/mostly hate relationship with this concept. Here's what happens. Comedy writers go to work for the establishment, because it keeps them off the street. In SNL's case, that establishment is NBC. By its nature, comedy is anti-establishment. And by their nature, successful members of the establishment got that way by having literally no understanding of what makes a joke work. To the executives, if people are quoting their show it means they're watching, which in turn means the show is succeeding. So the memo comes down to the comedy writers "Insert more catch phrase humor". And the writers begin their decade-long love affair with cocaine. By the time "Well isn't that special" and "I love it! I love it! I love it!" reach the audience, they're dead weight.
Now to be fair, a lot of the experience of laughter is social. If I start a "cheeseburger, cheeseburger" chant and people join in, I've activated a temporary community. We've all seen that sketch, and we're agreeing that we liked it for whatever reason. I'm not hurting anybody per se, but I'm also not being humorous.
Now let's look at the class clown. I've never known a class clown who was actually funny. They were always good at convincing the class that they were, but the truth is they weren't. There was no cleverness, no wit, not even any sense of timing. They were just loud. Their whole shtick was disruption, and everything in their catalog was a combination of obvious dirty humor and a parroting back of verbal memes from whatever happened to be popular at the time. They got laughs, certainly. But they never got respect. And never will.
Of course, respect might not be necessary for you to make a comfortable living doing cheap jokes as obnoxiously as possible; I'm sure Hollywood is always on the hunt for the next Jim Carrey. But my gut tells me that here in the age of Youtube with its leveled playing field, you're really going to accomplish nothing by being lazy with your humor.
Nobody can teach you how to be funny. Part of it is an X factor that simply wires your brain to think like an adult child. The rest comes from a lot of trial and error, blank stares, and projectile soda cans. But my best advice, if you're interested in nurturing your natural talent, is figure out what isn't funny and don't do that. It should be enough to keep you pointed in the right direction, assuming you're somebody who cares enough to want to experience legitimate humor.
I think that's the key, caring. Caring enough to risk not being funny, in exchange for a deeper connection to that world of "I was really funny today!". Laziness is never funny. Desperation is never funny. Vulgarity is rarely funny, and considering how common it is, I'd encourage you to steer away from it entirely in favor of something fresh. Always try to be better. Comedy is fleeting, and the moment you feel like you've made it is when it soars off without you.
To paraphrase the old inspirational quote, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you'll wind up in the cold vacuum of space, frozen and suffocating. And if you can survive that, you've got what it takes to handle comedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment