Jokes & Frogs

I would like to consider myself as ‘funny’. I think we would all like to be funny. When I was a kid, jokes were like a currency; they were the only worthwhile commodity on a primary school playground apart from Cheesestrings and Doctor Who cards. We would trade them between ourselves, expanding our own material as we worked our way up the ladder. Unfortunately, we weren’t intelligent enough to refine these jokes, opting to constantly repeat the same setups and punchlines until we sucked every droplet of humour out of the one- to two-liners. Admittedly, my school’s comic ladder was more of a step-stool: easy to reach the top but about as much prestige as a wooden box.

What is a joke? Academically, there are three main ingredients to a joke that must work together to create the perfect, gut-splitting gag. First you must FRAME the joke. This is the first act of the joke – the opening line must set up the upcoming story without any extra info. A man walks into a bar. The man, John, isn’t feeling as confident as he normally does after he just lost a big sale to the mattress store across the road. The bar is called Paddy’s and is an Irish pub, so the bar is stereotypically littered with green shamrocks and only leprechauns are allowed in. Except on Thursdays.

Then comes the TELLING. This is the story, the bulk of the joke and one of the scariest. Your audience has listened to the framing and, assuming they have signed the non-verbal social contract of agreeing to listen to the joke, are waiting to laugh. Just like a magician waving their hands around to misdirect their audience, the middle part of a joke is the first script that you are presenting. It is a clear and concise narrative that leads your audience to a final assumption, a thought that you have telepathically forced upon them.

And then the PUNCHLINE breaks it. This is the second script: a parallel story that runs beneath the first with the exception that its ending is unexpected. While it must adhere to the rules and laws of the brief world you have created, this final like must re-contextualise everything the audience has heard, turning a benign moment into a hilarious revelation. Amy Carrell defines the punchline as “the pivot on which the joke text turns as it signals the shift between the scripts necessary to interpret the joke text."If you added too many details in the opening, then there are very few avenues which end with a surprised audience. But everybody loves a broken rule.

Famous for his deadpan delivery, Norm Macdonald was every comic’s favourite comic. Many people have spoken about Norm’s comedy, especially when it comes to his unique delivery: long and messy stories that are so tedious to listen to they tick back around to being funny. The perfect and most famous example would be the one about the moth. There are many videos that talk about this joke and Norm’s style, but as E. B. White and his wife Kathrine famously wrote, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.”

So why write all of this if it’s never worth it? Because I’m not funny.