Who Writes Jokes

The question was "Who Writes Jokes??" Real stuff, not late night talk shows.

Read Jokester by IsaacAsimov (found in EarthIsRoomEnough?), in which a 'GrandMaster?' asks some sort of MultiVac? exactly that.

I try. I create jokes and tell them to people.

My most successful meme was "Life's Like That", used ironically, which made the top two TV networks within two months.

Joke creation is not too hard. Apply old ideas to popular news items. And steal wherever you can. :-)

The main thing to remember is that humor needs to be unexpected, and preferably illuminating. And it takes a fair bit of refining to get it right.

I saw a sig quote a few months back something to the effect of If Bill Gates only had a dollar for every time Windows crashes ... oh, wait a minute ... he does

Hmm. Does anyone here have a suggestion for how to continue after:

I say, I say, I say, my DAG's got no nodes?

(A word of explanation for the uninitiated: there is a Very Famous Joke that runs:

I say, I say, I say, my dog's got no nose.
- Really? How does it smell?
Awful.)

-- GarethMcCaughan

How does it route?

*pun on root desired*

I once told a joke to a friend that I had made up. About three months later, two other friends, who lived in other countries, both forwarded the same joke over e-mail. It was pretty weird.

The interesting question here is: how did the made-up friend manage to tell the joke to anyone else? ;-)

Oh, the other two friends were made up too, and so was the email. Like I said, it was pretty weird.

Especially since "made up" can mean "very happy" in some dialects/local variations of English.

I don't know if it's still the case in this internet-enabled society of ours, but a friend once told me most jokes make their way round the world so quickly from being told to airport bartenders.

Naw, that can't be it. Airport bartenders don't go around the world. But the people with whom they speak do.

I wonder if we're talking about jokes in the StandUpComedy? sense, which differ from classical jokes in that they are occasionally funny.

Most classical jokes I've heard start with some WackyPremise? involving a guy with a duck on his head, or a monkey that speaks Italian, and end in either a bad pun or an implication that someone in the course of the joke is part of some kind of perversion. If they're longer than three or four sentences, they almost never get more than an "Ah, I get it" from me. (This leads to the WorstPunEver.)

In contrast, good stand-up comedy is based on good storytelling, not a lengthy or repetitive setup-punchline pattern. Consider HenryRollins? and DavidSedaris?; both of them are hilarious, but neither of them are considered stand-up comics. Perhaps part of their appeal is that, not being comics, they don't really have to cause laughter.

I remember also hearing SpaldingGray? talking about comedy on the radio, wondering why so many comedians spend so much time setting up a punchline, when a well-told story would have you laughing all the way through? Monty Python followed that philosophy; its sketches often didn't have punchlines, or even endings. When they ran out of ideas, they went into a Terry Gilliam animation.

Humor like that shouldn't even be discussed with the same noun as those little obvious jokes that are independently invented throughout the country. When they're so obvious that anyone who hasn't heard it has invented it, it's PublicDomainHumor?. When enough of them manage to snowball into the same text file, it becomes BulkHumor and gets pumped out and forwarded through e-mail lists every now and then. "Fw: FW: Fw: Re: FW: Funny Joke!.vbs"

-- NickBensema

"That's the thing about being a raconteur, you learn to just weave jokes into whatever you're saying. I sneaked one into that last sentence, I'm not sure whether you noticed." -- Gary Shandling (slight misquote)

To answer the question, which perhaps spoils the fun of this page: There are professional joke-writers, who write jokes for a living. They usually do this either for either very popular comedians who want a reservoir of material (like Bob Hope), or television shows.

Some of these guys (and most of them are guys, for some reason) have written books on the subject; sadly, I can't remember any of the titles. A search for "comedy writing" is probably a good start.

Incidentally (so as not to completely suck the humor out of the discussion), JohnCeeDvorak? wrote a column recently about how he hasn't seen practically any new e-mail jokes in a good year or so (e.g. the "Fw: FW: Fw: Re: FW: Funny Joke!" e-mails). Why isn't anyone writing new ones, about the serial sniper in Washington or the war against Iraq or whatever? -- BrentNewhall

In one of SteveAllen?'s books, he writes that he is sure that professional joke writers don't write any of the "sick jokes" that follow tragedies, and that they don't write the strongly racist and sexist jokes that make the rounds. -- KrisJohnson

...Which would explain why those jokes aren't funny. ;-) -- BrentNewhall

One of the alt.comedy.standup FAQs says that if you write a topical joke, watch the late-night talk shows (AmericanCulturalAssumption). Watch Leno, Letterman, and Conan (and now Kilborn). If one tells the joke, you might be able to skate it past an open mike crowd. If two tell the joke, it's definitely too obvious. If three tell the joke, it's totally burned out. I've actually seen this happen; Leno, Letterman and Conan all told the same Dan Quayle joke one night. -- NickBensema

I've done so. Usually the results are less than pleasant. For example:

Sherlock Holmes discovered Professor Moriarty's secret lair was actually hidden in the sewer works. You know how, of course?

Good Heavens, no, how ever did he do it?

By a simple process of elimination. -- PeterMerel

MitchHedberg?, one of the funniest comics of this generation, recently passed away. His jokes were mostly very funny one-liners, but his delivery style added to the comic effect.

Some of his jokes (off the top of my head)

I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long.

Whenever someone hands me a flyer, it's like they are saying -- here, you throw this away.

Many more available at WikiQuotes?.

-- SriramGopalan

CategoryOffTopic CategoryJoke