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How to Tell a Joke -- A Guide to Joke-Telling

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How to Tell a Joke

Stunned silence isn't the response most of us are looking for when we tell a joke. To help improve your odds of laughter, you may want to try a couple tricks of the trade.

1.       Know your material. Practice telling your joke several times before telling it publically. Try it out in the shower, car, mirror while dancing.

2.       Is the joke right for your audience? Maybe your college buddies think your joke's a hoot, but will your mom?

3.       Be inventive! The best jokes are rich in interesting detail. If you mention a car in your joke, try giving it some personality. Is it a burnt orange Dodge Durango, a lime green Pinto? The more specific you are, the more you invite your audience in.

4.       Original jokes are the funniest. Nothing worse than mimicking someone else's warmed-over routine.

5.       The funniest jokes have a strong, unexpected conclusion. If your audience can see where you are going, you are more likely to elicit a groan than a laugh.

6.       Keep it short and sweet. Nothing funny about a five minute joke, unless you are a real pro. There are few people who can keep an audience's wrapped attention for more than a minute these days. Statistically speaking, the odds are against you.

7.       Watch out for detours in your joke. If you get sidetracked, so will your audience. Oh look, a chicken!

8.       Don't use accents unless you have mastered them. Nothing's worse than an Irish brogue that sounds more like an Indian accent. Also, be careful. In certain contexts, an accent in the wrong joke can be highly offensive. Just ask Rosie O'Donnell how well her "Chinese" went over on The View.

9.       If you don't fully understand the joke, don't repeat it. It's likely to be far more offensive than you think. I am still living down a joke I told my father when I was 12...

10.   The best jokes have a cadence to them, a rhythm. Try to keep your tone confident, expressive, but most importantly comfortable. Nervous giggles sprinkled about or too many "ums" and "likes" are instant mojo killers.

11.   Is your material offensive? If so, to whom? It doesn't take much talent to make people giggle when you drop the f-bomb. Unless you are Eddie Murphy or George Carlin, it's probably just nervous laughter.

12.   Listen to your favorite joke-tellers carefully. What makes their jokes so funny? Ask them where they get their material.

13.   Watch stand-up comedy for inspiration not imitation. There is a big difference between stand-up and joke telling. Professional comedians practice an art that requires years of intensive training to master. I would liken the difference between joke-telling and stand-up to the average blog vs. Ulysses. If people aren't already telling you that you are the James Joyce of comedy, you may just want to keep it short and sweet.

When it comes to online comedy, the signal to noise ratio is woeful. Over the last six months, I have compiled a list of some relatively good resources. More often than not, you will find something to laugh at when you visit these blogs.

BBC: The Comedy Blog offers humor from across the pond -- amusing links, trivia and general randomness.

Dave Barry's Blog -- semi-retired Miami Herald humor columnist maintains his online journal, sharing bizarre news stories and funny anecdotes.

SatireSearch aggregates satirical news, providing an excellent source for funny takes on current events. Not for the kiddies!

HumorFeed incorporates many of the same sites as SatireSearch, but has an editorial review process designed to improve the quality of the content. While there is some adult language, the contributors strive to keep it clean.

Dead Frog is Todd Jackson's comedy blog chocked full of industry news about stand-up and comedians.

Shecky Magazine -- industry insiders Traci Skene and Brian McKim regularly update their blog with comic news and interviews with well-known comedians.

A Brief History of Jokes -- Part One

Where do jokes come from?

If you have ever caught yourself wondering where jokes come from, you are not alone. Unfortunately, the answer isn't altogether clear. Some cultures have long standing, rich joke-telling traditions where lay folk routinely engage in some sort of comic creativity. Other cultures, particularly in the West, tend to favor a more imitative approach -- allowing professional comedians to seed the content and then take it from there.

In the US, there is a popular tradition that the majority of jokes come from prisons and stockbrokers. Alan Dundes, a University of California at Berkeley professor, once expanded upon this theory saying that "...stockbrokers have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around. Prisoners have a lot of spare time and a captive audience."

"Lately," Dundes added, "these two theories have merged."

The jokes that circulate on the Internet today, commonly known as "street" jokes, tend to be knock-offs of popular comic routines. However, the relationship between the comedic source material and the resulting street joke is not always clear. Street joke evolution seems to be analogous to the children's game of "Telephone." In it's final form, fundamental aspects of the joke's structure, rhythm, even basic themes may be altered substantially.

In 2003, Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire conducted his Laugh Lab experiment, an exhaustive research project designed to find the world's funniest joke. Wiseman collected over 40,000 jokes from 60 different countries. The jokes were then voted on by 300,000 participants online. The declared winner was a joke about two hunters from New Jersey who go into the woods.

Recently, Wisemen announced that he was able to trace the origin of the joke back to a famous British comedian from the 1950s, Terence Alan Milligan ("Spike"). Although Spike's version of the joke took place in a house in England, the punch line was essentially untouched.

Unfortunately, Wiseman's success in tracking down the origin of Laugh Lab's winning joke will likely remain an anomaly. As Wiseman explains, "Tracking down the origin of jokes is almost impossible. Of all the thousands of jokes that were submitted, the chances of knowing who wrote them, with one of two exceptions, is vanishingly small."

The Art of Joke-Telling

Practice Makes Perfect

Learning a new skill, whether riding a bike or rattlesnake hurling, requires an intense amount of practice. Sadly, we are unlikely to master any new skill if we fail to engage in some form of mind-numbing repetition. The good news is that our brains can and will rewire themselves. In the case of joke-telling, that means even the most dower old sour puss can learn to tell a great joke.

But before we head off to the practice mats, let's think a bit about why you want to become a joke-telling Sensei. You may be interested in mastering the skill of joke-telling to woo a love interest, get free beer, or entertain the street performers. Whatever your motivation, just make sure you have some. Mastering any new skill requires dedication, which in turn requires a good bit of obsessive self-interest.

Once you feel properly motivated, take some time to listen to master joke-tellers. If you don't know any great joke-tellers, check out Comic Wonder - the first competitive arena for joke-telling. You will quickly find Comic Wonder's top-rated joke-tellers on the home page.

Now listen carefully. What makes their jokes so funny? Is it their accents, details, embellishments?

The next step is to find a good joke to practice. If you are drawn to a particular genre of joke, start there. Now begin scouring the Internet for good source material. Once you have identified a joke you like, start adding details to it. If there is an element you find distracting, discard or change it. Once you feel satisfied with the joke's components, write it down and start practicing.

For a 101 joke, try to avoid material that requires accents, too many details, or a pun. Accents take a great deal of practice to master, as do intricate details. As for pun-based jokes, they are almost never funny.

One word of caution: joke-telling practice can have a deleterious effect on your closest relationships. Start practicing your joke in the shower or while you are driving - SOLO! Record yourself and play it back. What do you hear? Are there lots of weird pauses, ums, and ahs? Keep practicing.

Think you have a winning performance? Try your joke out anonymously on the unsuspecting masses first. At Comic Wonder, community members are likely to give you lots of feedback and encouragement. They also tend to be far more forgiving than your friends and family, who will feel no need to suffer your awkwardness in silence.

Great Joke-Telling Resources!

Comedy Portals

Even though my husband and I earn our livelihood in online comedy, I still find it searching for funny material online a frustrating, almost painful experience. Hanging out on YouTube all day just isn't an option for us. Beyond the fact that we have a free-wheeling 13 month old, it's a rare day we find anything worthwhile in the standard issue YouTube fare.

The following are some comedy portals we turn to when a laugh is needed. Although there are some rather bawdy and sophomoric material out there, these sites tend to have a better batting average than YouTube...

The Break
College Humor
Ebaum's World
Fark
The Onion
Funny or Die
Filecabi
PBF Comics
Jib Jab
Zug

Comments, Suggestions, Jokes!

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adamjn Dec 31, 2010 @ 1:38 pm | delete

Oh, and I also like the second one, I told my friend it and he burst out laughing :P

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A Few of My Favorite Joke-Tellers

Over the past month, I have had a unique opportunity to listen to hundreds of amazing jokes told by very funny amateurs. In some cases, they are masters of accents and mimicry (e.g., TommyBoy). Others, like Palley, know how to tell a clean joke that just catches you right with the punch line. However, my favorite joke-teller remains Puppet Love with his brilliant performance of "Jesus walks through the pearly gates."

Jokes on the Wire...

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Favorite Squidoo Lens

More joke-telling resources

Clean Jokes: Jokes appropriate for the family dinner table or the classroom can be hard to find. Barbara Feldman, "Surfing the Net with Kids" syndicated columnist, decided to make "clean jokes" the topic of this lens.
Joke of the Day: Tired of jokes that aren't funny? Check out Andrew's lens for some good material!
How to Write Your Own Original Jokes: Graham Perry has created a lens on how to write an original joke. As I believe the world needs new jokes to circulate, I thank Graham for his effort!

Very funny images

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How to Tell a Joke -- A Guide to Joke-Telling

How to Tell a Joke

Contents at a Glance

Contents at a Glance

A Guide to Funny Blogs

A Brief History of Jokes -- Part One

Where do jokes come from?

The Art of Joke-Telling

Practice Makes Perfect

Great Joke-Telling Resources!

Comedy Portals

Comments, Suggestions, Jokes!

A Few of My Favorite Joke-Tellers

Jokes on the Wire...

Favorite Squidoo Lens

More joke-telling resources

Very funny images

Joke Links

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