I too have only heard this when Buddy Hackett was on The Tonight Show; Johnny Carson was the straight man for this line and you would believe he really didn’t see it coming. That particular event was also described by Penn Jillette in “How To Play in Traffic” (p. 103). He compared it to watching a space shuttle launch from a couple of miles away, because you see the launch and just as you start to think, “That’s funny, I don’t hear anything” you hear this overwhelming ROAR.
That book is where I got it from. Except they don’t compare the shuttle to an overwhealming roar, they compare it to getting hit in the chest with a bat.
That’s my problem, too - not thinking of things later when it’s too late, but I trying to keep myself from saying wildly inappropriate things right on the spot.
Hah! That made me laugh just reading it.
As for funny things, monkeys are always funny, and the letter “k” is the funniest letter. See - there’s a “k” in “monkey.”
Nearly everything can be misunderstood, if you try hard enough.
For example: I actually saw a sign in a shoe shop the other day that said “SALE! Buy one get one free on all mens shoes”. I was very tempted to ask “isn’t that just how it normally works?”
I’m even more tempted over here where for the past couple of years it has been abbreviated as just “BOGO” (which is sometimes get one free, and sometimes just half-off or x% off or some such.) I do want to go in and say “Yeah, normally, when I buy one, I do get one.”
BTW I was actually watching the Tonight Show that night. It might have been the same show where Buddy said, “When I was growing up, at my house we always had two choices for dinner: Take it or leave it.”
Know your audience.
Different people think different things are funny. Some respond to sarcasm, some to satire, some to physical humor.
Some jokes play better one-on-one, some are better for a group.
I like to feel people out and find out what makes them laugh. When I first met my wife all my friends thought I was hilarious and told her so. She never thought I was funny.
It took me a few years to figure her out and find what she responds to. I can make her laugh now but she still says that when I’m around my friends I act stupid.
Once people believe you’re funny, then anything you say or do automatically is seen as funny. When you witness a pedestrian hit by a car, it’s horrifying. If it’s your funny friend, you think it’s the greatest prop joke EVER.
The biggest laugh comes after 0.3 to 1.7 seconds of . Make them think about it a tiny bit before they get it.
This requires knowing your audience and targeting the joke to what they know. If you go too obvious, you’re explaining the joke before you even start. If you go too obscure, then either they have to think about it too long and the moment is lost or you end up needing to explain it. Or they just smile, nod, and nervously change the subject.
Delivery is everything (and timing is a subset, though a major part). If your delivery is good, you can make the phone book sound funny. If it’s bad, you can fuck up anything.
And it becomes very obvious when you try too hard.
I think the secret to comedic timing is to deliver the punchline just a hair of a split second before the audience thinks of it themselves. That way, it reinforces their own thought processes, and makes them feel smart (which they like), but makes them think you smarter (and you agree with them, which they like).
Of course, pulling this off requires a great deal of knowledge of your audience.
It seems like Daniel Tosh has a mastery of having the audience think *just *a fraction of a second too long for the joke. It pays off with him, though. He makes it work.
I think the best comedians are the ones who understand how to harness the magic of absurdity. Also, the ones who understand that just because someone finds something funny, it doesn’t mean that they really are racist, or bigots, or whatever the subject may be. It just means that they found humor in the absurdity of that joke.
. Make them think about it a tiny bit before they get it.