HOW TO WRITE A JOKE
You
don’t need to be good at telling jokes to be able to write them. If you get
tongue-tied down the pub when everyone is rattling off one-liners, don’t
despair. Many good comedy writers are shy people.
The classic joke structure is a setup which establishes
an expectation, followed by a punchline which subverts it. For example: “My husband
left me on Tuesday and I’m depressed. Because the bastard came back on
Wednesday.” The first sentence sets up an
image (depressed because he’s left) which is turned upside down by the punchline
in the second sentence (depressed because he came back). There’s a great joke
from a Woody Allen routine: “When I was a child I was kidnapped. My dad leapt
into action – and rented out my room.” Our
expectations of a heroic dad fighting to rescue his son are overturned by the
cynical reality. In each case the punchline provides a surprise which makes us
laugh.
So all you have to do is tell a little story in
which the second part subverts the first. Easy? Well, sometimes, but usually
you have to do a bit of work. Give yourself a theme to write about. Let’s try dating,
it’s something everyone’s done and is full of emotional complications which are
great for comedy. On a sheet of paper, write down a list of topics related to
dating: going to a restaurant, kissing, the cinema, blind dating, speed dating,
dating people at work, etc. You can expand the list yourself.
Now look down the list and see if we can find
ways of twisting a topic into a setup and punchline. One good technique is switching
it round or inserting something else. Let’s look at “blind dating”: what can we
switch in that? How about deaf dating? After doing a little work we could come
out with “I’ve stopped blind dating and now do deaf dating. It means I don’t
have to listen to them.” You can change the wording slightly according to your
gender.
Wordplay is another useful technique. We can
find different word meanings, either through contrasting usage, as a well-worn
phrase or as a straightforward pun, and incorporate that into the setup –
punchline structure. Looking down our list, we find “dating people at work”.
Dating the boss is interestingly fraught. Also, the word “date” has subtle
shades of meaning. “I asked my boss for a date. So she gave me a month’s
notice.”
Don’t stress yourself by expecting to come out
with a string of comedy pearls all the time. It’s normal to produce a few
mediocre groaners before finding that little gem. You’ll need to polish the
phrasing by cutting out unnecessary words, finding shorter ones where you can,
and giving it a good rhythm. Words with a hard consonant, often “k”, work well.
“Kipper” is funnier than “fish” and “cake” is funnier than “gateau”. And at all
times think of that magic setup and punchline structure.
