There are jokes that we know are jokes because professional comedians use or have used them to try to get laughs. And audiences often make the friendly gesture of laughing when a comedian is standing there waiting for a laugh, especially if the joke is somehow known to be socially accepted as a joke. But I’m amazed that anybody ever actually laughed spontaneously at them. Example: “I just flew in from New York, and boy, are my arms tired!”
Once upon a time the relationship between men and their wives’ mothers was considered so fractious that the very word “mother-in-law” could just about count as a joke. Example: “What’s the penalty for bigamy?” “Two mothers-in-law.”
I expect that people too young to have heard these in comedy routines would just stand and wonder why they were supposed to be jokes.
“First prize: 1 week in (name a city). Second prize, TWO weeks in (name the same city)”.
These were likely funny in the original Aramaic.
On the “flew in” I have a somewhat humorous true-life tale. Decades ago, my brother worked at a shipping firm, as a truck log auditor (among other things). Stuff like (IIRC) whether they’d adhered to rules regarding time driven etc.
One day in December, a trucker came in with his log book, and said “I was in Phoenix this morning, and I just FLEW in”.
My brother, horrified at the thought that the trucker had driven fast enough to get there from Phoenix in a day, said “Ummmm… It’s Christmas. I’m going to pretend I did not hear that!”. (note: the distance involved would have made the timing basically impossible - he’d have had to drive something like 200 miles an hour).
The trucker laughed and said “No, really. The company let me fly home, because it’s the holiday”.
Bob Hope treated his writes like trash. If they asked for raises, with proof that other comics’ writers were getting more, Hope would tell them he wouldn’t want to hold them back, and fire them. On payday they’d have to gather under a balcony where Hope would sail their paychecks folded into paper airplanes. It was because the jokes really didn’t matter: the audience payed to see Bob Hope deliver lame jokes that went over, or bad jokes that he then joked to cover over.
A man goes to prison and the first night while he’s laying in bed contemplating his situation, he hears someone yell out, “44!” Followed by laughter from the other prisoners.
He thought that was pretty odd, then he heard someone else yell out, “72!” Followed by even more laughter.
“What’s going on?” he asked his cellmate.
“Well, we’ve all heard every joke so many times, we’ve given them each a number to make it easier.”
“Oh,” he says, “can I try?”
“Sure, go ahead.”
So, he yells out “102!” and the place goes nuts. People are whooping and laughing in a hysteria. He looks at his cellmate rolling on the ground with tears in his eyes from laughing so hard.
The way I heard it was, the new guy yells out a number, and gets crickets. He sits back down, embarassed, and his cellmate says “You didn’t tell it right.” Both versions work, I think.
The moment Trump got elected everybody and their mother started doing HORRIBLE Trump impressions and none of them are funny.
People who can actual construct jokes or nail the voice 100% is different but the We Hate Movies podcast Trump impression literally sounded like Sylvester Stallone.
I lived in an area with a dozen or more comedy clubs in the 80s and went often. Saw a lot of great comedians, and some not so great. But even the not great ones had some occasional good material.
The exception was Lenny Schultz, who I think had been on Laugh-In. I sat there without even smiling though his entire act. Not even close to being funny. It was just him being hyper and moronic, interspersed with displaying a lot of dumb comedic props. I really couldn’t understand how anyone would find him remotely amusing. They say he influenced a lot of other comedians, and if true, they can’t help but be better than he was. Wish I could have have that 45 minutes of my life back.
From the UK the archetype would be the mother in law joke. Les Dawson I remember as a prime culprit. “I’m not saying my mother in law is big, but she just got a job kick starting jumbo jets at Heathrow.” When jokes are so unfunny that they stick in your memory for fifty years, that’s bad. The odd thing is, away from these awful routines he was innovative and genuinely funny. Go figure.
I was just reading about how Johnny Carson hated having Bob Hope as a guest because Hope would insist in scripting out the entire interview and jokes when Hope would appear on The Tonight Show. Hope had enough sway at NBC to insist on this. Carson mentioned how Hope would get lost if he went off script and that Hope had almost no ability to improvise(something Carson was great at.)
I’m about 58 years old so growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Bob Hope comedy specials were on NBC regularly. I think around the holidays. I remember he would stand there and do a stand-up routine that we never found funny.
I’m a year younger, and I also remember the Bob Hope specials. They were on so often, and had such fanfare around them, that it seemed like he must have been important. And he often had some sexy actress on as well, which mattered to young me. But Hope himself seemed to be doing the same routines he had been doing since his days in the USO tours during World War II.
I’ve watched a few of them on YouTube or somewhere; he’s okay when he has someone to play off of but when he gets to the football players, I hit fast forward. Cringe material there.
That’s a classic (and by classic, I mean very old) example of a misdirection joke. The humor comes from the unexpected left turn the punchline takes. The problem with that type of joke is that you can really only find it laugh out loud funny the first time you hear it.
Emo Philips is a master at misdirection jokes. One of my favorites is “my girlfriend was mad at me because I didn’t open the car door for her. But I was too busy swimming to the surface”. I still appreciate the cleverness and the dark humor of it, but I’d never laugh out loud at it again because the punchline will not take me by surprise.
I listen to a lot of comedy podcasts, and I hear comedians often lament how easy musicians have it when they perform-- everybody wants to hear the hits over and over again, while comedians have to constantly come up with new material (with some notable exceptions-- I’m sure Gaffigan gets sick of people yelling out “do Hot Pockets!'”). Comedy in general often ages about as well as room temperature sushi.
Way back in the days of Ed Sullivan, most ‘clean’ acts were of the “My wife she. . .” genre. Dangerfield was fresh, and so was Phyllis Diller. The jokes seem lame now because they’re not only not fresh, they’re beyond stale. Some of the old story comics (as opposed to one-liners) were timeless, like Newhart and Cosby. You can still laugh at their routines.
I was in LA and went to a taping of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. After it was over, the studio audience was invited to stay for a Bob Hope special taping, and we did.
Hope’s monologue lasted 45 minutes. Some of it was funny, some of it not so funny, and some jokes just bombed, eliciting little to no audience reaction. But it was 45 minutes.
When I saw the Bob Hope special on TV a few months later, the monologue had been edited down to 10 minutes, and only contained the jokes that the studio audience laughed loudest at.
One of my favorite subversions of the “opening desperate for a laugh” line is from an early Bo Burnham set. He was all of nineteen years old, comes on set and after standing there listening to the audience’s nervous laughter for a while, says, “Don’t worry, I’m hilarious.”