From Keep It Simple
Twelve years ago, I was given a magazine assignment to do a ten-minute stand-up comedy routine at New York's Improv. The results were not pretty. An effective storyteller, but a stranger to the upstanding comic arts, I devised a routine that consisted of rambling, complicated gags that made too many demands on the audience's attention. One joke involved George Armstrong Custer's refusing to share a peace pipe because he feared the effect of secondary smoke on Sioux papooses. Nobody got it.The day after the story was published, Jay Leno, whose advice I had vainly sought before doing my routine, called me from an airport. A generous man, he said that I had made the classic mistake of the amateur by frantically muddying the waters. His simple advice: Keep it simple.
"If you just do a joke about the funny noise that potato chips make when you bite into them, you'll get more laughs. Jokes work best when they're easy to understand," Leno explained.
Years and years later, I am still not a good joke teller. I cannot remember jokes, I do not deliver jokes well, and I could not write a good joke if you paid me. I once addressed a conclave consisting of 400 repo men, repo wives and repo children without getting a single laugh. Luckily, I didn't have a car parked outside. Sensing that this was a serious chink in my humorist's armor, I recently began consulting with people who are good joke tellers. This is what I learned:
Never tell a joke unless you've actually heard it told before. So says Bill Scheft, head monologue writer for David Letterman. "This is the only way to know what part of the joke works best, the only way to pick up the right pauses and intonations."
For example: Jack Benny, who was supposed to be stingy beyond belief, famously got his biggest laugh when a holdup man said, "Your money or your life!" and Benny would pause for 45 seconds, and then say, "I'm thinking about it."
Other tips: Only tell jokes in front of an audience that is already inclined to be on your side. Or as Scheft puts it: "Don't think of a joke as an ice-breaker; the ice already has to be broken and in the glass."
"Saturday Night Live" alumna Julia Sweeney makes another good point about the importance of not forcing things. "Avoid announcing that the joke is going to be hysterical," says Sweeney. "And don't look people in the eye afterward expecting them to be really amused. Besides that, I think it's a good idea to back off the punch line, to not oversell it. Just kind of throw it away."
If you're going to tell a number of jokes, don't go with your best one first. This is a great piece of advice that actually comes from a gifted amateur, Julian Mostel, nephew of legendary funnyman Zero Mostel. To be funny, he believes that you need to hold some material in reserve, because joke telling is a competitive art.
"If the waiter tells a joke, I feel that I have to top it," Mostel explains. Presumably, nobody wants to be outclassed by an annoying guy with a ponytail whose name is Todd and who will be your waiter for the evening. This is an interesting coincidence because while I have never met a funny waiter, I am the kind of person who feels that if the waiter mispronounces the house special in French, I have to mispronounce the dessert in Italian.
Build Up Energy
Match your material to your audience. "Jokes help develop kinship and affection with strangers," says my sister Eileen, one of the two best joke tellers I know. "I work in health care and I always tell this story about getting lost in a small town and asking a cop for directions and being told, 'Make a right and keep going until you get to the corner where the Laundromat used to be until it burned down.' And the punch line is: Following those directions is like trying to understand Medicare."Know the joke by heart. Says Scheft: "Don't get halfway through the joke and start to improvise." Like, don't say, "Oh, I forgot, the guy was six-foot-seven and dressed as a marionette."
Other tips of a more general nature: Don't overlook the value of a great one-liner. They're easier to remember and can get you just as far as a joke can. For instance: "Did you hear the one about the two Frenchmen trapped on a desert island and the one offered the other a government job?"
Also remember: Repeating the punch line only works if you are Jay Leno. Explaining your joke works only if you are Johnny Carson, who loved to pretend that his material wasn't working.
Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice comes from Henny Youngman, the best joke teller I ever met. He told me: Keep your jokes short, and keep them coming. One day 20 years ago, I spent an hour and a half trying to interview him at the Friars Club. But you couldn't actually interview Youngman, because he could only speak in jokes. Trying to get him to talk like a normal person was like trying to get an Eskimo toddler to speak Farsi. So when I asked him, "Where did you grow up?" he replied, "Overseas. Like the two little ladies sitting in a room in Krakow. And the one says, 'You see what's going on in Russia?' And the other says, 'No, I live in the back; I don't see nothing.' "
"When you're telling a joke, you have to build up energy," says Scheft, who's been writing for Letterman now for 12 years. "You have to show people that you're committed, that you're willing to work to make this joke succeed." Beginners often make the classic mistake of telling a joke in a halfhearted way, as if it were homework. Here we come to a key point: Don't tell a joke unless you are actually funny. Even if you are funny, Scheft feels that it helps to "legitimize" a joke by saying that somebody famous told it to you, as in, "I was with the Pope the other day, and he passed this one along. ..."
When I lunched with Henny Youngman, I asked him what he thought was the single most important element in telling jokes. "Know a lot of them," he said. "Milton Berle knows a million jokes. If you knew a million jokes, you'd be funny."
Yes, but if I knew a million jokes, I'd have enough money to get out of the humor business.
Advice From the Late Night Crowd
The most important thing is to keep it short. It's like knowing when to leave the table in Vegas. Get your laugh or, if you're lucky, laughs, and then get off the stage. If you don't trust yourself, hire a friend to tackle you after four minutes.-- Conan O'Brien
My favorite storytellers, Bill Cosby and Jay Leno, always draw a vivid picture while they work. Good details, language command, good acting. They use voices -- and they have their own voice. The bad storyteller says to an audience after bombing, "You had to be there." The good storyteller makes you think you were there.
-- Arsenio Hall
Never say "but seriously" after a joke. It doesn't work. Just move on to the next joke or the next part of your speech.
-- Jay Leno
"Crickets" is what we call it at "The Tonight Show" when someone tells a joke and there's dead silence in the room and all you can hear are crickets chirping. Jay Leno reads and writes some 1,500 jokes a day to get 20 for that night's monologue, and on any given night there are one or two that might not get a laugh. He's the best there is and if he occasionally gets crickets, so will you. It's okay, you'll live. Just understand that no one bats a thousand.
-- Jon Macks, "Tonight Show" writer From How to Be Funny by Jon Macks (Simon & Schuster)