The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny Even if You're Not Read online

  But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can also find truth and pain in small events: Why does the dieting man never get around to changing a light bulb? Because he’s always going to start tomorrow. The truth is that the human will has limits, and the pain is that we can’t always transcend those limits. If you want to know why a thing is funny, ask yourself what truth and what pain does that thing express.

  Take a moment now and tell yourself a few of your favorite jokes. Ask yourself what truth and what pain is suggested in each joke. Consider that this truth and this pain are the theme of the joke.

  As you’ll notice, not all themes are universal. After all, not everyone is on a diet, or henpecked, or even afraid to die, though most of us know someone who is on a diet, henpecked, afraid of death, or all of the above. Humor works on the broad sweep of big truth and big pain, but it also works on the intimate level of small truth and small pain. The trick is to make sure that your audience has the same points of reference as you.

  When a stand-up comic makes a joke about bad airplane food, he’s mining a common vein of truth and pain. Everyone can relate. Even if you’ve never flown, you know airplane food’s, shall we say, ptomainic reputation. You get the joke.

  You don’t have to be a stand-up comic, or even a comic writer, to use the tool of truth and pain. If you were giving an after-dinner speech, for example, you could start your talk with something that acknowledges the truth and the pain of the situation.

  ‘I know you ‘re all anxious to get up and stretch after that long meal, so I’ll try to be brief “ (Pause.)

  “Thank you and good night. “

  The truth is that speeches run long, and the pain is that audiences get bored. The savvy speechmaker cops to this reality. For reasons we’ll discuss later, you often don’t have to tell a joke to get a laugh; sometimes you just have to tell the truth.

  Sadly, politically incorrect humor, like sexist or racist jokes, also trades on truth and pain. Let’s see if I can show you what I mean without offending anyone.

  Suppose there’s a group called the Eastsiders and a rival group called the Westsiders, and these two groups tell jokes about each other. From an Eastsider, then, you might hear a line like, “If a Westside couple divorces, are they still cousins?”

  The Eastsiders, as a group, hold in common the truth that Westsiders are venal or immoral or stupid. Their common pain is that we have to put up with them. I won’t press this point, since I have no desire to teach racists or sexists how better to practice their craft. Suffice it to say that any human experience, no matter how large or how small, can be made to be funny if its truth and and its pain are readily identifiable to the target audience.

  In television situation comedies, for example, you’ll hear more jokes about body parts than about sacred texts, because most viewers (and I’m willing to bet on this) know more about butt cracks than the Bhagavad-Gita.

  Here’s a joke that a lot of people don’t get:

  “How many solipsists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  This joke is only funny (and then only barely) if you know that a solipsist believes in nothing but his own existence (and in that only barely), and so is forever and always alone in his world. When you throw a joke like this at an unsuspecting audience, you make them work far too hard to discover its truth and pain. By the time they sort it all out, if indeed they do, the moment has passed and the joke is no longer funny.

  The difference between a class clown and a class nerd is that the class clown tells jokes everyone gets while the class nerd tells jokes that only he gets. Comedy, thus, is not just truth and pain, but universal, or at least general, truth and pain.

  But wait, there’s more. We know from the commutative property of addition that if comedy = truth + pain, then truth + pain = comedy as well. (See? I learned something else in seventh grade math beyond the fact that love makes you stupid.) So if you’re dying to be funny even if you’re not, simply pick a situation and seek to sum up its truth and pain.

  Any situation will work. A trip to the dentist. A family vacation. Getting money from an ATM. Doing your taxes. Reading this book. Cramming for an exam. Anything. Anything. Because every situation has at least some implied truth and pain. Suppose you’re studying for a big test. The truth is, it’s important to pass. The pain is, you’re not prepared. The joke that encompasses this truth and pain (using the tool of exaggeration, which we’ll discuss later) might be:

  I’m such a lousy student, I couldn’t pass a blood test.

  See how easy?

  Okay, okay, I know it’s not that easy. After all, if everything you needed to know about comedy were right here in chapter one, then you could read this whole book standing in the checkout line, and I’d be out a not inconsiderable royalty.

  Also, let’s not kid ourselves. This book won’t make you funny, not by itself. That’ll only happen if you do a lot of hard work along the way. And it won’t happen overnight. No reason why it should. Look at it this way: Suppose you wanted to be a wood carver, and someone told you there was a thing called an adze, great for carving wood. “Wow,” you’d say, “an adze! Imagine that.” Just knowing that the thing exists, of course, gives you no clue how to use it, and further, knowing how to use it doesn’t mean you’re going to carve a teak Pieta on the first try. You have to learn to crawl, to coin a phrase, before you can pitch forward on your face.

  2

  The Will to Risk

  A newspaper reporter called me not long ago. Since I’m now some sort of soi-disant expert on the subject of comedy, this reporter wanted to know if I thought that there were people with absolutely no sense of humor. Was it possible, the writer wondered, to be completely and irremediably unfunny?

  The question put me in mind of my first boss, a moon-faced woman with a Hitlerian haircut who cherished the notion that junior advertising copywriters should be seen and not heard. One day, in a fit of nihilistic spunk, I put a live goldfish in her tea. Soon I was collecting unemployment. “No sense of humor,” I thought at the time, but I now see that all she lacked was my sense of humor. The fact is, not everyone agrees on what’s funny.

  But everyone can be funny, and that’s what I told the reporter. If people aren’t funny, there are usually two things lacking. One is an understanding of what’s funny and why, which we’ll tackle in due time. The other, far more important, element is the will to risk. To my mind, the will to risk is a tool, and like other tools, it can be learned and understood and mastered.

  Yes, yes, yes, some people have more natural humor in them than others, just like some people have perfect pitch or a knack for hitting the curve ball. Most of us have more humor than we know. What we don’t always have is the will to risk, and the will to risk is really the will to fail. We’re taught from early youth to abhor failure, but odd as it may seem, a willingness to fail is one of the most valuable tools in your comic toolbox. It makes all of your other tools easier to use, and use well.

  So the first big task of this toolbox is to boost our will to risk. And the first step in that direction is to . . .

  ERADICATE BOGUS THINKING

  Of course, there’s all sorts of bogus thinking in this world: aerosol cheese is a good idea; just one cigarette’s okay; the little red light on the dashboard doesn’t really mean anything’s wrong. I now commend to your attention two particularly insidious types of bogus thinking: false assumptions and faulty associations.

  When we think about telling a joke, or trying a new idea, or, really, engaging in any creative act, there lurks behind our conscious thinking the following false assumption: It won’t work; they won’t like it. So in the moment between thinking a joke and telling a joke, the “unfunny” person throws this huge roadblock in his or her own way. It won’t work. They won’t like it. Maybe I’ll just keep my big yap shut, play it safe; yeah, that’s the thing
to do. And that’s just what they usually do. And so we think of them as shy or repressed or boring. A drag, and no fun at parties.

  Okay, so why is it won’t work a false assumption? After all, maybe it won’t work. Maybe they won’t like it. Well, true, that’s a possibility. But we have a whole body of hard evidence to the contrary. Sometimes jokes do work, so the assumption of failure is inherently at least partly wrong. Every bit as wrong, that is, as the assumption of success. You just won’t know until you try.

  So why not try? What have we got to lose? In fact, deep in our secret hearts, we feel—or fear—that we have a great deal to lose. That’s where the faulty association comes in. Having first decided, most bogusly, that our joke won’t work, we leap to the amazing conclusion that when “they” don’t like our joke, “they” won’t like us either. We create within our minds the grim certainty that we will look stupid or foolish or otherwise diminished in someone else’s eyes. Why is this a faulty association? For this simple reason: People aren’t thinking about how you look to them. They’re far too busy worrying how they look to you.

  Each of us is the center of our own universe, and our universe is of surprisingly little interest to the universe next door. Burdened by our fears, we jump through hoops to keep from looking bad in others’ eyes. But as it says in the Koran, if you knew how little people thought about you, you wouldn’t worry what they thought. And then, just to thicken the glue, we throw in one more faulty association: “When they don’t like me, I can’t like myself.” Man, this one’s scary. We spend so much time fortifying our self-image with what others think that by the time we get around to firing off a joke, our entire ego is on the line. If the joke misfires, ego-death must result. That’s why a stand-up comic says, “I died out there” when a show goes bad. Behind all the bogus thinking is the biggest bogus thought of all: If I fail, I die.

  Let’s look at the whole loop again, just to make sure we understand it. You open your mouth to tell a joke, but a little voice says, “Hang on, that might not work.” Then another little voice answers, “Of course it won’t work, and when it doesn’t work, you’ll look like a failure, a fool.” And a third voice chimes in, “If you’re a fool to them, you’re a fool to you, too.” And finally, “Your ego will die; then you will die.” That’s a big burden for one poor little joke to carry, is it not?

  Look, I can’t straighten out all these self-image issues in one slim chapter in a book that’s not even about that anyhow. If I could, the book would be called The Ego Toolbox: How to be Totally Together and Really Well-Adjusted, Even if You’re Not. But what I can do is give you some strategies and tactics for silencing those bogus voices in your head. Here’s the first, and most valuable:

  KILL YOUR FEROCIOUS EDITOR

  Gather all your bogus voices, tie them together in a metaphorical knot, and label the knot “my ferocious editor.” Recognize that it’s the job of your ferocious editor to keep you from making bad mistakes. Sometimes your ferocious editor does a legitimate job, like when it keeps you from mouthing off to a cop or telling your loved one what you really think about that new haircut. But your ferocious editor has its own false assumptions. It assumes that it knows what a bad mistake is, and further believes that it’s always acting in your best interest. Your ferocious editor simultaneously underestimates your chances for success and overestimates the penalty for failure. Tell your ferocious editor to go to hell.

  Easier said than done, right? After all, your ferocious editor is a strong-willed sumbitch. Plus, I have presented this useful fiction that your ferocious editor is somehow a force of opposition, and not really part of you at all, but we know better, don’t we? Your ferocious editor is you, and how do you fight you?

  Later, when we’re talking about making good jokes better, or rewriting to comic effect, or polishing your gems, we will bring the ferocious editor back to life. We’ll welcome him in and say, “Now. Now is your chance to be demanding and unrelenting in pursuit of quality. Go for it, ferocious editor, for you are my best friend.” But here, in this early stage, we really need to silence that voice, neutralize that cranial bully who wants its fears to be your fears. To kill your ferocious editor, you’ll need weapons. The rule of nine is one of my favorites.

  THE RULE OF NINE

  For every ten jokes you tell, nine will be trash. For every ten ideas you have, nine won’t work.1For every ten times you risk, nine times you fail.

  Depressing? Not really. In fact, the rule of nine turns out to be highly liberating because once you embrace it, you instantly and permanently lose the toxic expectation of succeeding every time. It’s that expectation and the consequent fear of failure that give your ferocious editor such power over you. Remove the expectation and you remove the power. Simple, clean; a tool.

  But wait, isn’t there a contradiction here? Didn’t I just say that you can’t assume success or failure? Didn’t I say you won’t know until you try? Then how the heck can I assume a dreadful and paltry 10% success rate for our comic endeavors? I can’t, really. Fact is, I don’t have a logical leg to stand on. I invoke the rule of nine not as a truism but as another useful fiction to help me in my never-ending battle against fear.

  Maybe you think I’m splitting hairs. What, after all, is the difference between fearing failure and assuming failure? The answer lies in expectation. When you expect success, you fear failure. You have something to lose. However, with the rule of nine, your expectations start so low that you have very nearly nothing to lose. But wait, there’s more.

  If you only expect one joke in ten to work, then it stands to certain reason that you’ll need hundreds and hundreds of failed jokes to build a decent body of work. You’ll have to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail, and try again, in order to reach the point of trying and not failing. By simple mathematical logic, you end up persuading yourself that the process of failure is vital to the product of success. This co-opts your ferocious editor; it’s not dead yet, but maybe a little less bossy than before.

  The rule of nine, then, is a tool for lowering expectations. Let’s try it out and see how it works. Generate a list of ten funny names for sports teams. Remember, it’s quantity, not quality, we’re after here. In fact, to lower your expectations even more, try to complete the exercise in five minutes or less. This further works to convince your ferocious editor that nothing’s at risk, nothing’s on the line.

  Later, we’ll be able to attack this comic problem with a whole slew of tools. For now, though, just ask and answer this question: What would a funny name for a sports team be?

  The Memphis Mudskippers

  The Slaves to Alliteration

  The Hair Triggers

  The London Fog

  The L.A. Riot

  The New York Happy Cabbies

  The Fighting Dustmites

  The Mgpxrhgmerersters

  The Team with the Incredibly Long, Virtually Unpronounceable, and Almost Impossible to Work Into a Cheer Name

  Not a particularly funny list, is it? But with the rule of nine, it doesn’t have to be. All we’re trying to do here is get used to writing things down, without risk or burden, expectation or fear. Now you try. We’ll assume that you have a blank piece of paper or the back of an old envelope to write on. I’ll be suggesting quite a few exercises throughout this book, and, while no one’s holding a gun to your head, remember that the first step to mastering tools is getting a feel for the darn things. Maybe you should stock up now on old envelopes. Or you could always use a notebook or scrawl in the margins. Sometimes I’ll leave some blank spaces on the page. Like I said, the first rule is that there are no rules.

  Want to make your ferocious editor retreat some more? Do this:

  LOWER YOUR SIGHTS

  This makes no sense, right? After all, people are always telling us to raise our sights. True, but then people are always telling us that the check is in the mail, and they’ll still r
espect us in the morning, and a six-jillion-dollar deficit is nothing to worry about, so we can’t necessarily believe everything they say anyhow.

  Whether you’re a stand-up comic or a screenwriter or a novelist or a humorous essayist or a cartoonist or an artist or a greeting card writer or a public speaker or whatever, you’re possibly burdened by the strong desire to be very successful right now. No sooner do I start writing this book, for example, than I catch myself wondering whether it will sell a lot of copies, get me on the talk show circuit, make me famous, and lead to other books, movie deals, and invitations to all the best parties. Sheesh, it’s not even published yet.

  And yet, right down here on the level of this sentence, I’m hoping that this book will make me a made guy. I really want to be a made guy, but as long as I dwell on what it’s like to be a made guy, a winner, I can’t concentrate on writing this book—the very thing I’m hoping will make me a made guy in the end. To mix a metaphor most heinously, here at square one I’m looking for pie in the sky. What in heaven’s name do I do now?

  I lower my sights. I concentrate on this chapter, this paragraph, this sentence, this phrase, this word. Why? Because hope of success can kill comedy just as surely as fear of failure. With the rule of nine, we attack our fear of failure. By lowering our sights, we attack our need for success.

  I can’t stress this point enough. Right now the only thing that matters is the task at hand. Concentrate on the task at hand and everything else will take care of itself.

  Yeah, right, Pollyanna. Just do your homework and the book will get published, and the talk shows will call, and the money, the fame, the glory, the party invitations will magically fly in the window. Okay, maybe not. But this much you know to be true: If you don’t concentrate on the task at hand, then the book (or play, or joke, or cartoon, or essay, or speech, or greeting card, or stand-up act) will never get finished, and you’ll have no chance at the glory you want.