"There are exactly 5 different ways to tell a stand-up joke"

Cafe Society
1

I heard a stand-up comedian on a podcast claim that pretty much all jokes can be summed up into 5 different categories but only those 5. He wound up only saying 2 before he got distracted but was curious if this is actually true both in terms of stand-up comedy and if this is what stand-up comedians are “taught”.

He claimed the five different ways were

  1. Exaggeration
  2. Absurdity
  3. False-lead
2

There are three types of people in this world - those who understand math and those who don’t.

3

There are 10 types of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Try the veal! :wink:

4

I’m not sure if our OP @Asuka is the whoosher or the whooshee here.

5

The founder of The Onion puts the number at 11.

6

I had the veal picatta last week. Awesome!

7

One… two… five!
Three sir!
Three!

8

He said he was going to name all 5 but only said 3 before somebody in his podcast live chat distracted him, he wasn’t doing a bit and am curious what all 5 are.

9

I’m still waiting for someone to tell me how to keep an idiot in suspense. Surely they can tell me by now.

10

There are two types of people in the world. Those who put everything into a category and those who don’t.

11

Noooooo!

There are two types of people in the world:
Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.

12

To steal from Will Rogers:

13

Since stand-up comedy is a performing art, let’s move this to Cafe Society (from FQ).

14

I’ve seen numerous articles saying that there are only X types of jokes. Each article had a different number.

The breakdown I like best is these three.

  1. That’s right.
  2. That’s wrong.
  3. That’s silly.

I was going to give examples, but upon further thought, I decided that they are self-explanatory.

15

There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who divide people into 2 categories and those who don’t.
-Robert Benchley

16

I have read many articles or books claiming that all jokes can be divided into X categories. Each source had a different number.

To me, that suggests that any attempt to reduce all jokes to a small set of categories is futile.

For example, in the book How to Kill in Comedy, Steve North (The Comedy Coach) gives a whopping 20, which he calls Formulas (I would say writing techniques). I will not list them.