Saturday, April 01, 2006

Comedy Slump Over


I had three jokes on with a certain late night talk show host this past week – two just last night. That is good because I have been out of the flow for a while. I think it was this blog – I really got carried away for a time before wrapping my head around it. One of the jokes was, “A new study shows that you can get a brain tumor from a cellphone, especially if Naomi Campbell is beating you with it.” For you aspiring comedy writers out there that is the standard technique of connecting two things in the news. Letterman relies on this as does everyone else. Letterman likes taking cultural references from here and inserting a foreign culture twist. You get a TV show called “Mohammed in the Middle.” This is the cultural version of connecting two things in the news.
In this case we had Naomi, who apparently has some anger issues, and this study. The cellphone reference could have gone to Russell Crowe but that’s dated. By the way, I read Naomi was furious because she couldn't find a pair of jeans. Hey, if this was a fashion thing, all is forgiven. I just wish one time she'd hit her assistant because they were arguing about economic globalization or something like that. I swear ever since that hot school teacher in Florida beat the sex charges because she was too pretty to go to prison, these supermodels have been acting like they are above the law.
The other joke last night? I honestly can’t remember. You have to shed these things or your mental pipes will back up on you. And for you aspiring writers out there, that’s an unfortunate example of connecting two metaphors not in the news.
Oh yeah, I just remembered the other one: “The Senate has passed a new ethics law and it’s pretty tough. From now on bribe money must be in a clear plastic bag. No more paper.” The slump is over.

2 Comments:

At 11:38 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you have to give the money back when the jokes bomb?

 
At 8:00 AM, Blogger Bill McDonald said...

Once a joke bombed so badly that he referred back to it several times throughout the rest of the monologue.
They told me they would have edited it out but because it was so bad he mentioned it later, and they had to keep it in. Cha-ching!
Another time a joke bombed so badly that I assured them I would only use the check for something painful like a trip to the dentist.

 

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