I Once Tried to Write a Joke
/I once tried to write a joke. Not a "what's the deal with airline food" joke, but a "two guys walk into a bar" type joke. The former is the true art form. Stand up requires thinking of something funny, then trying different phrasing and iterations to get the precise wording of the joke. The comedian then has to make choices around timing, delivery, pauses, attitude, mannerisms and a plethora of other details before it's complete. As Jerry Seinfeld points out, memorizing the words is step one of a hundred steps to make a joke work.
Writing a "joke" as people typically think of them, that is: set up, pause, punchline, is a different beast. You have to write a joke that anyone can remember and deliver like a professional. The subject matter has to connect with a wide audience.
When I decided to create an original joke, I instinctively knew that to write a good joke, I'd need to have a killer subject. So I turned where most professional comedians turn... a humorous calendar.
I'd been given a twelve month calendar as a Christmas gift. The theme of the calendar was "humorous signs" and each month concentrated on a different sub-set of that overall theme. One month had humorous church signs, another silly traffic signs.
The month that served as the inspiration for my joke was a month devoted to funny restaurant signs. There was one for a restaurant called "Three Brothers Restaurant" that had a picture of four gentlemen on it. I mean seriously, you can't make this stuff up. But the sign that got my creative mind going was for a Chinese restaurant called the Fu King restaurant.
Can you imagine? I can just picture Jim Norton taking that gag and running with it. But this was mine, all mine. I set myself to the task, and like any professional comedian, I spent about six minutes crafting my joke and then placed it in the back of my mind to pull out for my friends at just the right moment.
I don't recall precisely how I brought the joke out, but if it's anything like the joke itself, it was probably awkward and awful and shoe-horned in somewhere it didn't belong. I imagine it went something like this:
Friend - "I just found out my aunt has cancer."
Me - "Hey that reminds of a joke... Two guys are trying to decide a business to start. The first guy calls the second andsays, 'I figured it out, we'll open a Chinese restaurant.' The second guy says, 'I'm not gonna open a fucking Chinese restaurant.' 'But we'll make a lot of money', says the first guy. The second guy insists, 'I'm not gonna open a fucking Chinese restaurant.' 'Well, I already put the money down,' says the first guy,'but if you want, I'll let you name it.' And so the second guy names it the Fu King Chinese restaurant."
See what I did there? See how I just took what was on the sign in the calendar and then just crammed some words in front of it? I also like, in retrospect, how there's no rationale for the second guy hating the Chinese restaurant idea. And the punch line isn't a punch line at all, it's a total non sequitur.
To my friends' credit, they listened to the joke, no matter how terribly I raised the subject, and then sat there silently as I stumbled through it. They all said it was funny even though there was no laughter and there were visible cringes as I wrapped up.
I was immediately embarrassed and ashamed at how awful the joke was. Perhaps if I had said it out loud to myself or practiced it in a mirror, I could have saved myself. In my head, it was amazing, but once in the real world, it was anything but.
If I were a real comedian, which I clearly am not, I would have tweaked the joke and tried it on another group. But I did not. I never told the joke again.
I feel like this is representative of a larger problem I have, which is moving from one project to another, seldom finishing many. So, while I was ashamed of how horrible the joke was, I'm also ashamed at being too scared to try and improve it. So in the name of healing, I present the joke that should have been:
A guy decides to write a joke about two other guys opening a Chinese restaurant. After realizing how terrible that idea is, he drinks a bottle of bleach.