How to Tell a Joke (page 2 of 3)

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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.