Joke Writing 101

Today’s study joke: “Barry Bonds is really anxious about this new book about him. In fact, he’s been on pins and needles waiting for it to come out.”

I wrote that this morning and if 10 other comedy writers didn’t write it as well, it could sell as mine. One of the things that cracks me up about joke writing is how standup comedians always feel they’ve been ripped off, when someone else thinks of the same joke as they did. Most of them don’t write all that much, so when they do come up with a joke, to them it feels like they’ve been hit with a beam of clear light from heaven. Then the joke is inserted into their act where it often resides for decades. Take the Barry Bond joke above: It’s a statement of fact, followed by an old expression. It might seem clever in a way, but if someone else comes up with it, too, I won’t sweat it.
Right after Cheney shot the lawyer, I submitted a joke about the bad weather in Washington, D.C., “It was so cold Cheney shot the weatherman.” That same joke turned up on the Late Show with David Letterman. No big deal. I certainly didn’t imagine a conspiracy. In fact, much more complicated duplicate jokes can be explained away if you break them into their individual components. Start with the likelihood of each step.
The headline on the post below: “Scientists Hit 3.6 Billion Degrees, Paris Hilton Says “That’s Hot”, is funny but not anything that special. If you sat there and asked yourself about references to “hot”, every last one of you would get to it eventually, if you pay any attention to today’s culture, and that’s not saying you should.
Frankly, though, I worried that some Internet reader would accuse me of stealing it from the Fark website, since it is exactly their kind of line. So I checked, just out of curiosity. If you read the piece below, we both zero in on the comedic aspects of the scientists not knowing how they did it. That’s the duplicate Insight with this. But here is the way they handled the main headline: “Scientists set record for hottest temperature ever in lab, even hotter than the sun and have no idea how they did it. What could possibly go wrong?”
So another day in joke-writing. I use an often repeated phrase by a celebrity; they use the “What could possibly go wrong here?” cliché. I’ll let you decide which is funnier, but nobody can be too proud, so it’s on to the next joke.