There are really only two kinds of jokes in the world: the kind you tell and the kind you play.
I once made the terrible mistake of telling a fellow writer, as a joke, that I had recently been paid an insanely large sum for writing a half-hour comedy script. I actually named the figure – it was about 10 times the going amount at the time – and held my face in a blank and emotionless expression, what is sometimes called a “deadpan”, as the fellow writer’s eyes popped nearly out of his skull.
“You. Are. Kidding. Me,” he said, with deadly seriousness.
“No,” I said. “That’s what they paid me.”
“That. Cannot. Be. True,” he said, once again barking out each word in a confused and desperate sputter.
You see, I knew this guy was competitive – precisely how competitive I was about to find out – and that the several minutes I allowed him to believe that I was vastly outearning him would elevate his blood pressure and probably cause a series of tiny, undetectable strokes.
I fully intended to clap him on the back, sometime just before the combination of jealousy and competitive rage caused him to experience what neurologists refer to as a “cerebral accident”, break into a hearty laugh and say: “Yes! Of course I’m kidding!” But there was something in his expression, something about the way he said “Really? You? No way!” that made me hesitate and then ultimately decide not to tell him at all.
That’s the difference, I suppose, between telling someone a joke and playing a joke on someone. When you tell a joke, you first prepare your audience for it. When you play a joke on someone, you just spring it on them.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”
That’s what a lot of us say right before we tell a joke. The point, I think, isn’t really to let the listener know that he or she can hold up a hand and say: “Heard it!” What we’re doing – even if it’s only subconsciously – is alerting the other person to the fact that a joke is on the way.
Jokes are funnier when they’re expected. For a joke to work well – to “land”, as we say in the comedy business – it helps if the audience has adjusted itself into a joke-hearing attitude. Jokes, in fact, often follow the most shopworn patterns – two guys walk into a bar, say; an Irishman and a Frenchman (or anyone else) are walking down the street; a husband is arguing with his wife – with tiny variations somewhere around the punchline.
So stop me if you’ve heard this one: four guys are playing golf one afternoon. As they round the ninth hole, a funeral procession drives by. One of the guys stops mid-swing, removes his hat, bows his head and says a short prayer.
“I didn’t know you were so easily affected by funeral processions,” one of his friends says.
“I’m not usually,” the guy says. “But I was married to her for almost 40 years.”
And then he steps up to the tee, takes his swing and resumes the game.
That’s clearly a joke, of course, though it wouldn’t be out of place as a story on one of those websites that specialise in collecting examples of eccentric and borderline human behaviour. It’s not totally unbelievable, in other words.
It’s also clearly designed to be a joke because no one’s weaknesses and character flaws are being exploited and turned against them. The most successful pranks, as opposed to the most successful jokes, almost always leverage the subject’s natural flaws – vanity, greed or in my friend’s case, obsessive competitiveness – in such a cruel and remorseless way that even when it’s all over and the laughter has died down, there are still lingering hurt feelings.
When I finally told my friend that I had not, in fact, been paid that amazing sum, it took a while to convince him.
“You’re just saying that,” he said, “because you don’t want me to fire my agent.”
I patiently explained that I was just playing a little joke on him.
“You’re so competitive,” I said. “It almost makes you blind. I knew you’d have a hard time believing any studio paid anyone that amount, but I also knew that you’d have an equally hard time not believing it.”
For a prank to successfully land, it has to be specifically designed for the target. Calling up someone and telling them that their house is on fire isn’t a funny or clever prank, because it’s a meaningless and random lie. But call up a pompous or snobbish person and tell them that someone wants to photograph their house for a magazine article, and then reveal that the magazine article is titled 50 Decorating Disasters, is a pretty great joke to pull on someone. It’s also a terrific way, it turns out, to get a person back for convincing you that he was paid vastly more than you for writing a script.
And that’s the other main difference between the jokes we tell each other and the jokes we play on each other. When we tell a joke, the other person tells one and soon everyone is laughing. When we play a joke on someone, the other person is single-mindedly determined to get revenge and soon everyone is furious with each other.
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
