Road Apples by Tim Sanders

Road Apples
June 22, 2009

Jokecraft 101

Mark Twain observed that the humor in a humorous story depended on the manner of telling the story, while the humor in a joke depended on the brevity of the joke and the “nub,” or punch line. While we agree with Twain that the telling of a humorous story is a uniquely American form of high art, we believe that almost anyone, even a Frenchman or a journalist, can tell a joke.

So we’ll stick with what we can handle, and pass along some helpful hints for telling (or emailing) jokes:

LAUGHING AT YOUR OWN JOKES - Don’t. If you are emailing a joke, do not add the superfluous :) smiley face, or LOL. Either the joke works or it doesn’t.

CAPITALIZATION AND EXCLAMATION POINTS - Use them only when necessary. Study this punch line: “Then, after the lawyer went out to sleep in the barn there came another knock on the bedroom door, and when the rabbi opened it, THERE STOOD THE COW AND THE PIG!!!” Those capital letters and exclamation points suggest that the emailer was stung by a hornet while typing, and only serve to distract the reader.

DETAILS - My late father-in-law could tell some of the funniest stories imaginable. He never told a story the same way twice, and had a way of adding seemingly extraneous details that enriched the tale and made tears roll down your cheeks. But when it came to telling jokes, those details only got in the way. The popular joke about the Auburn student on Pensacola Beach and the potato needed few details. When the teller added superfluous information about the type and size of the potato, the potato blight in Idaho that year, and the fact that the hapless lad was a graduate student majoring in Philosophy, the magic was lost.

TIMING - Timing is very important. Jack Benny and Bob Newhart were timing experts, and always used the pause for maximum effect. When emailing jokes, you need to use a series of three dots (an ellipsis) to indicate a pause. If you wish to indicate an exceptionally long pause before your punch line, instead of inserting a page full of ellipses, you may just want to wait and send another email in a day or two. That will really heighten the suspense.

GRATUITOUS EXPLETIVES - Most of us remember when we discovered dirty words. I first encountered really hard-core dirty words (like “poopyhead” and “buttface”) in kindergarten. My friends and I learned better ones later, and by the time we reached junior high had compiled an impressive vocabulary of nastiness, which we associated with manliness and sophistication. I did not use that language at home, because my dad would have knocked me and my manly sophistication into the next county. Most of us outgrew our fascination with vulgarity, but there were always those who felt they were more entertaining if they could toss dozens of really coarse words into their jokes. These guys were usually the very dimmest bulbs on the shelf, and associated humor with expletives because their dimwitted friends all laughed at the naughty words, even when the joke itself was lame. If you’ve ever turned to one of the comedy channels, I’m sure you’ve seen some of these children (many of whom are in their sixties) spewing their bilge. If the F-bomb isn’t used at least 87 times in a comedian’s routine, he is considered hopelessly unsophisticated, and the more cultured in the audience boo and hiss and throw rotten vegetables.

ESSENTIAL EXPLETIVES - Yes, there are some jokes which require strong language, but strong language is only effective when seldom used. I remember hearing my dad say “DAMN!” once. I’d heard other, more sophisticated expletives in the schoolyard, but that “DAMN” was the only bad word I’d ever heard my dad utter in my twelve years. My Aunt Betty had just arrived, and my friend Jeff Beavan and I were using the bed in the guest bedroom as a trampoline, to break it in for Aunt Betty, I suppose. It was an old, four-poster bed, and it came crashing to the floor while we were executing some very difficult flips. That “damn” was effective precisely because I’d never heard Dad use it before. Had Dad gone around saying damn this and damn that all day long, I wouldn’t have feared for my life, and Jeff wouldn’t have fled the crime scene.

Sometimes a strong word adds just the right flavor to a punch line. Consider the famous “Hark, I hear the cannons roar” joke.

The joke involves Ned, an old, down on his luck actor living in a Los Angeles flophouse. He gets a call from his agent, who tells him he finally has a part for him. There’s a play on Broadway, and one of the actors just suffered a stroke. He needs someone to fly to New York immediately and step onstage that very night. He’s already purchased an airline ticket for Ned, and will have a car at the airport to whisk him to the theater. “You only have one line, Ned,” the agent says. “It’s ‘Hark, I hear the cannons roar!’” So Ned, who realizes this is his last chance to get back into show business, writes that line on his hand.

The joke progresses slowly, with old Ned repeating “Hark, I hear the cannons roar, hark, I hear the cannons roar, hark, I hear the cannons roar” over and over, annoying everyone on the plane and even the New York limo driver, who gets distracted, misses his turn, and just barely gets Ned to the theater in time. Once there Ned is hustled backstage, made up, and put into costume, all the time repeating his line, “Hark, I hear the cannons roar!”

So when Ned is pushed onstage, and hears that deafening explosion, he screams “WHAT THE _________ WAS THAT?”

Inserting words like “heck” or “dickens” into that punch line just doesn’t work. There are several alternatives, but obviously they must be a bit stronger or the punch line loses its punch.

If none of this helps, we have in our files a foolproof joke about a PETA representative and a cleric from Cleveland called The Ayatollah Johnson, which relies on the line, “That was no lady, that was my alpaca.” For five dollars, we’ll send you the whole thing, which is so deadly we’ve registered it with both the FDA and the Department of Homeland Security.