4320/17239
I’d really like to be able to write jokes. It’s something that would surely help my prospects in my chosen career. But if I come up with a new one-liner every two years I feel blessed. And I don’t think I have written more than five top class one-liners in my career. I may not even have written one. To be honest, even my better “one-line†jokes are closer to four or five lines. My enemy being his own worst enemy is maybe my best joke and it’s probably at least a minute long.
I don’t have a particular affinity to one kind of humour and would, in an ideal world, like to be good at all kinds of comedy, rather than a master of just one. It’s never a style of comedy that is redundant anyway, it’s just that the more popular ones are so well mined that it’s hard to come up with anything original. One liners are hard because so many people have come up with one liners on every subject that it’s hard to come up with something new (I know the American Office certainly riffed on the own worst enemy/enemy’s enemy idea/keep your friends close- though after I had done so and would be surprised if nobody has ever connected the sayings before), similar slapstick and observational comedy are perfectly good formats for comedy when done with originality and expertise, but that’s increasingly difficult as there are only so many ways you can fall over and so many things you can observe.
But a really good comedian should be able to find new jokes in anything, even in subject matter that has been well-trodden - and I think a lot of critics make the mistake of thinking a subject is “hack†because many people have a joke on that subject, when in fact if you can find a new angle on something that many people have covered then that’s actually incredibly impressive. Jokes can be hack and have been made before, but that doesn’t make subjects hack. If you can find a new cock joke or routine about airplane travel that is genuinely original, then you are one of the greatest comedians in the world.
I’d love to be able to do one-liners, especially clean one-liners, if only because they are a great way to get an audience laughing, but also I am often called on to do 10 minute spots to audiences who don’t really know me and I can’t usually do my “Railways and the Holocaust†or “All children are sexcrement†stuff from a standing start. And it’s pretty easy to fill 90 minutes when you can talk about buying yoghurts for 40 minutes. But what skill it would be to do a long set, made up of shorter ideas, that still worked as a whole and had people laughing all the way though.
I liked jokes when I was five, but by the time I was 12 I found them rather limited and childish. I wanted something with more meat to it and like most people interested in comedy quickly saw through the formulas and made up my own jokes that subverted the predictable and well-known punchlines. In fact I was initially dismissive of stand-up as a way of delivering comedy because I thought it was limited to jokes and didn’t allow for the subtle interplay of character or bigger ideas that I preferred (I was wrong about that as it turned out). But it’s all very well to take the piss out of bad or obvious jokes, it’s quite another to come up with good ones of your own. And I really wish I could do it. Maybe I could if I really, really tried. But I don’t think I could come up with enough to even do a 20 minute set. Maybe that’s something to aim for. If I wrote a one liner a day for a year, I wonder if I’d have enough good ones for a short set that would be funny all the way through, without being formulaic or hack.
Perhaps this is what Twitter was created for.
Getting a laugh after two minutes of saying stuff that has no laughs in it is actually pretty easy - people want a release of tension so as long as you know what you’re doing you can get there even if you’re ad-libbing. But 20 minutes of wall to wall laughs, from jokes that are no longer than a sentence. Those are the guys who should be winning awards.
It’s very hard to come up with a one-liner that will make a comedian laugh, but I am at least going to start collecting the ones that do, in the hope that I can somehow learn how to do them
And at the moment my absolute favourite joke and a fine example of how a one liner can surprise and be smart and not run to a formula comes from Mitch Hedberg. I don’t know a great deal about this comedian and have probably only seen about five minutes of his stuff and there’s no chance of me catching him live, due to the fact that he is unfortunately dead. But amongst his many fine one-liners is this one- "The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.â€
I don’t need to analyse that or tell you why it’s great. But boy do I wish that I had come up with that. Or could come up with anything like it. Succinct, properly funny and yet also subtly satirical and undermining.
It’s pretty much perfect, though I did idly wonder today if it might be funnier if it said “the wall†rather than “a wallâ€. “A wallâ€is funny because it implies that every wall is better at tennis than he (or indeed anyone) is, but “the wall†implies that the wall that he plays against is his own particular nemesis. That he spends all his time playing the same wall, furious that he can never beat it and yet still trying. I suppose you might argue that “a wall†might equally imply that he travels the world playing all the walls in the hope that he might discover one that he can defeat. In fact I just argued that and by doing so pretty much convinced myself that Hedberg went the right way. But I still like the idea of making it about a particular wall and making the whole thing personal. I wonder if Hedberg had this conversation with himself. The joke is so brilliantly constructed and precise that I feel he might have. And he plumped for “a†over “theâ€. Or maybe it all just came out like that and he never thought of changing it. Because it worked. Or maybe he tried it my way and it didn’t work as well. Maybe it would confuse audiences and they’d think they were missing something about a particular wall. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s equally funny each way. Or just differently funny. Maybe it doesn’t warrant this level of thought.
When we wrote together in the 90s Stewart Lee and I would spend entire days arguing over issues like this, whether “a†or “the†would make a line better. It seems crazy that one of us wouldn’t back down after say an hour of discussion, but we were both very passionate about comedy and in such broad agreement generally that we usually only had the minutia to argue about. And as I hope the above demonstrates it does make a difference. Perhaps not a big enough one to waste as much time on as I just have, let alone a day of your life and probably in most cases the joke was as funny or not funny regardless of the article that precedes the noun. But comedy is that precise sometimes, even when you’re writing a seemingly sprawling routine, but even more so in a joke. And you can’t argue that “a shrek†is funnier that “Shrek†and also funnier than “the shrek†so it is worth fighting for.
Perhaps these protracted discussions were just a way (or the way?) of us venting the inevitable frustrations that we had with each other without having to punch each other in the face (an option that we surprisingly only attempted once). Or maybe one of us was objectively right and the other was objectively wrong. But it does make a difference.
Anyway, I can’t argue with Hedberg about who is right and wrong on this one and maybe it’s presumptuous to even try and do it alone. But it’s a great joke and a benchmark to aim for. I didn’t manage to write a one liner today, but in tribute to him, how about “The depressing thing about snooker is that no matter how good I get, I’ll never be able to defeat myself.â€
Maybe not.
Another exciting guest confirmed for RHLSTP. Next Monday, 29th September, as well as chatting to the brilliant Katherine Ryan, I will be interviewing the powerhouse writer and performer, Mark Gatiss from off of Doctor Who, Sherlock, League of Gentlemen and of course, best known for playing Greg Evigan in TMWRNJ. Book your tickets here.
