“A funny thing happened on the way to [fill in the blank]” is said to be an age-old stand-up comedy formula. But are there documented examples of jokes that start this way? Google only seems to turn up (1) references to the musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or (2) riffs on this formula in a non-joke context (e.g. “a funny thing happened on the way to the future…”).
I thought it was the traditional opening line of a ‘letter to the editor’ not a joke per se
Adding that to the Google search seems to back that up.
Theater. The name of the play is a take on “A funny thing happened on the way to the theater (or club)” . In other words a “funny thing happened just recently on my way here where I am talking to you now.” It’s an opening to any funny story and is supposed to make the story/joke/punchline seem spontaneous and not scripted. I suspect it was so overused that it became a tell that you were about to hear a tired old joke.
This. It’s not the start of a joke, it’s a lead-in (or segue) to a joke.
Are you sure you don’t have that mixed up with “Dear Penthouse, I never thought I’d be writing you…”?
I went to the newspaper archives and searched for “a funny thing happened on the way to”.
The first close hit was a filler anecdote headlined Humorous from 1923, with the story starting “a funny thing happened over my way tuther day.” Yes, “tuther.” Dialect humor was the bee’s knees. That got reprinted under various forms for years.
The first exact hit comes from Warner Ray’s syndicated column for May 24, 1942. Radio comic Fred Allen was quoted as saying:
“If Hitler were a radio comedian and attempted to explain his present predicament in Russia, his opening gag would probably be, ‘A funny thing happened on my way to the Kremlin.’”
The phrasing of that indicates that he was riffing off a usage so common that everybody would know it. I can hear Bob Hope saying it in my head.
Henny Youngman is quoted using it in Billy Rose’s August 30, 1946 column, after he destroyed a heckler, and was able to restart his act with “A funny thing happened on my way to the club this evening.”
A satiric how-to-be-a-comedian article from 1950 ended with a fake monolog, “You know, a funny thing happened on my way to the studio…”
On January 20, 1953, Eisenhower’s inauguration, a columnist wrote “this is the day that Adlai [Stevenson], the Illinois humorist, can say: ‘You know, a funny thing happened on my way to the White House.’”
In 1954, the joke was pounded into the ground when Humphrey Bogart supposedly was a guest columnist for Drew Pearson’s very serious political column. Whoever ghostwrote it started the column with “A funny thing happened on my way to the studio the other day.”
There are more, including cartoons, but you get the point. The line really was used, all audiences were immediately familiar with it, and it became fodder for satire because it was an old cliche long before the play used it.
There’s a book published in 1910, written by Bonnie Benson Sheaffer, that’s titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Church, but I can’t find anything else about the book.
Thanks all!
Makes sense - and specifically, the lead-in to a first-person joke that takes place in a public setting like a park or a sidewalk. (Such as “A man came up to me and said he hadn’t had a bite for five days - so I bit him!”)
We can push it back to being a version of a tired and hackneyed phrase already over-used the would-be humorous before 1872. In that year the London Punch commented:
Suggestion to Mr. Lowe.— Lay a heavy tax on all persons telling old jokes, making old puns.
Let the tax be doubled in the case of any person attempting to pass off such old joke or pun as ‘a good thing he’s just heard,’ or as ‘a funny thing that happened to his cousin the other day.’
Mr. Lowe will find public-spirited men ready to hand in nearly all Clubs who will voluntarily give their services, and for a moderate percentage will act as collectors of this particular form of taxation at every dinner-party (where the name and address of the offender will be taken down), and in Society’s drawing-rooms. This and a tax on photographs will bring in a handsome additional revenue for eighteen seventy-two.’
I tried searching for just “a funny thing happened” in the newspaper database but got so many hits that I just gave up. I agree that’s probably the ur-phrase but it took somebody to add “on the way to” to make it into a meme.
I’d say it dates to the first time someone made a joke about comedians as a class. Johnny Carson must surely have been a prime vector for the phrase.
Chris Rock’s opening line the first time he appeared several days after the infamous slap by Will Smith: “So…how was your weekend?” Although nothing surpasses the classic, “Boy is Vaughn Meader fucked”.
Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Rubens at the 1991 MTV Music Awards, making his first public appearance since his arrest for indecent exposure: “Heard any good jokes lately?”
Credit Lenny Bruce.