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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.
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