What is a Joke? Same Joke, Different Day

In a previous article in this occasional series, I asked when a joke is not a joke. A slightly different question is when a joke is the same joke but in different clothing.

Some jokes, which different people arrive at independently, are the same in a very obvious way. For instance, someone I know who dabbles in stand-up and comedy writing (and hopefully won’t take that description as an insult) came up with the following gem:

‘I met a guy who insisted that he was an Eighties pop star. I didn’t believe him, but he was adamant.’

A gem which a couple of years later I discovered a fairly well-known stand-up had also arrived at (he didn’t use it in his set, but each audience member got a sheet with extra jokes he couldn’t fit in, and this was one of them). The wording was different, but only very slightly (there’s only so much leeway this kind of joke allows).

A slightly trickier example: compare Demetri Martin’s joke about toilet graffiti (11.20 here)

 

With Mark Smith’s observation about dates (at 5 minutes):

 

I’m inclined to say that these are the same joke – they have the same premise, are structured the same way, and only the details of each situation differ. On the other hand, it’s possible to judge them as better or worse jokes (I prefer Smith’s), whereas if they really were the same joke, it should only be possible to contrast the delivery of each, or perhaps the phrasing.

In thinking about these examples together, a short answer is that they fall at different points on a sliding scale, from being all but identical to having something more abstract in common. What’s lacking is the kind of structured way of thinking about jokes that is possible with music, where we can compare pieces in terms of melody, harmony, chord progression and so on.

One practical implication of these questions concerns the thorny issue of joke theft. Apart from cases where the wording (or the relevant gestures) is exactly the same,  such cases can only be accounted for by a common idea, or a common idea set up in the same way. [ii] But of course what counts as a common idea or as the same way of establishing it is very much up for debate, as the above examples indicate.

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[i] Full disclosure – this is one of mine. I first told it a few years ago, hence the now misleading age.

[ii] Obviously it requires more than this to show that it’s a case of theft as opposed to comedians independently coming up with the same joke (as was the case in each of the examples above). But without some criterion for the ‘same joke’, the issue of joke theft could not arise at all.

Local Heroes

The internet may or may not have led to the creation of new kinds of humour (depending on how novel you take lolcats to be), but it has certainly allowed existing forms to flourish in new and unexpected ways. An online hit from last year was Sminky Shorts, a series of brief cartoons trading on the basic formula of animals talking like humans:

The Sminky phenomenon raises a couple of interesting issues. One is the degree to which these cartoons work because of their distinctively Corkonian inflections and idioms. Some of them are good sketches in and of themselves

whereas others, such as ‘Crocodiles’ (the first video above) get by almost entirely on charm – although I found this one just as amusing as ‘Tommy’. I’m curious to hear whether readers not fortunate enough to hail from Cork like these films, and if so why.

The other interesting trend Sminky Shorts illustrates is the rise of local humour with global reach. There is an audience on the internet for distinctively regional comedy, either original material (as with Sminky Shorts and a previous Irish hit, the Rubberbandits), or redubbing existing footage, for instance Scooby-Doo with north-eastern accents and copious swearing:

This would have been all but impossible twenty years ago, when local humour tended to be confined to a local audience (for instance on regional radio stations). Humour which reached a national or international audience required a major platform (usually television or cinema), which couldn’t, by and large, risk carrying anything too parochial. Thanks to the internet, people in Colchester, Canberra and Quito have access to cartoons by and about Cork people. And not just people, but agents and production companies as well.

Sminky Shorts has global reach, but can it achieve global popularity? Jason Sullivan has signed to London agency, but it remains to be seen what new markets he can find with them. For all the on-line success, I suspect the cartoons are primarily a hit among Irish people, and more specifically people from Cork. There is no reason in principle why crudely-drawn shorts can’t develop into something with much greater impact, but whether Sminky Shorts can do this while retaining the local flavour which has until now been its selling point is a different question.

Random Rules (It’s Kevin, BBC 2)

That The Actor Kevin Eldon has landed his own series is worthy of celebration. His face, a precision-tooled comic device, perennially disappointed but never quite despairing, has provided beautifully judged support in two decade’s worth of television comedy, from Big Train

to Nighty Night

and seemingly all points inbetween.

It’s Kevin, though, can’t be all about this wonderful physiognomy. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to be about anything at all, except the pursuit of the random. In some quarters, it has been hailed as part of a welcome return of silliness and 'out there' comedy to the television schedules. While the first episode is recognisably silly, I'd query any suggestion that it is 'out there' in the sense of being challenging or unconventional. True, it doesn't have many sketches with immediately recognisable plots, but random for random's sake is itself a well-established and (dare I say) rather stale convention.  

Obviously, sketches don't need to make sense, and a sketch show doesn’t need to have a central theme or a unifying structure, but there is a danger in pulling too hard in the opposite direction which It’s Kevin unwittingly illustrates. It feels like it’s trying too hard, cramming in non sequiturs, sketches whose only attempt at humour is an unexpected juxtaposition, and what appear to be references for their own sake (e.g., the Monty Python-esque talking cardboard cut-out of the Duchess of Cornwall). Worse, a number of these elements, such as the vox pops, feel overcooked. In A Bit of Fry & Laurie, these were funny because of the lack of context and juxtaposition, rather than because of anything hilarious the talking heads came up with. Here they include a surreal bit about slicing a seal in two to make the perfect sandwich, which is not only trying too hard but perhaps missing the point of this format.

However, the thing about randomness is that sometimes it works, and when it does it is all the more compelling for being inexplicable; witness Hitler speaking in the voice of George Martin:

 

There is little point in analysing this sketch, beyond noting the slyly subversive juxtaposition of Beatles Anthology-style documentary with every History Channel programme ever made about the Third Reich (that is, every History Channel programme ever made). It simply works; the seal-slicing vox pop doesn’t. But this does prompt the thought that random humour, because if its very starkness, its either-it-works-or-it-doesn’t quality, requires its creators to simply throw lots of ideas at each other and hope that some stick together. And this means that to unearth the comic diamonds of sheer randomness, it is all but inevitable that you'll have to first dig through layers of sedimented wackiness.

This, for all I know, is precisely Eldon's plan. I'm still not convinced; I prefer him in shows with a clearer sense of drama or atmosphere in which his peculiar downbeat energy can work. But it seems that, given the choice, he would rather tit about. And after twenty years of supporting roles, it's hard to blame him for indulging himself.

Making it Explicit

A bit of delayed New Year’s cleaning-up, this: a post I began before Christmas, prompting by seeing Sightseers. The most interesting feature of a worth-catching-though-not-mind-blowing film was the violence, or to be more precise the ways violence was used. A great deal of time is spent building tension as what Tina and Chris are what they will do, interspersed with a few brief but surprisingly graphic depictions of murderous carnage and its aftermath.

I understand that these shots are important to the aesthetic of the film, both as nods to British horror and slasher films, and as providing Tina and Chris with an unpleasant verisimilitude. But, for what it’s worth, they jarred a little with me. In fact, I felt that they worked against the building of tension which preceded them in each case – it might have been better to hold back more, to string us out a little longer by implying rather than showing what happened. They felt a little cheap – which is not to say they cheapened the film as a whole.[i]

All of which poses a perhaps unanswerable question – would Sightseers work without these shots? Unanswerable in that any answer will amount to a subjective judgement and indeed an expression of personal taste regarding the need for violence in a film partly about grisly killings. A slightly more interesting question is whether it would work as a (very black) comedy without explicit violence. I’m inclined to think it would. The explicit bits aren’t funny in themselves,[ii] and I don’t think they were needed to bring out the humour. What’s needed is the contrast between the mundane nature of Tina and Chris’s travels and their wilfully excessive responses to the irritations they encounter en route; and this contrast doesn’t require that we actually see what happens.

A possible if slightly random comparison might be with Lena Dunham’s Girls, celebrated for its gritty realism and audacity, a large part of which involves some non-Beautiful People[iii] having non-stylised sex. This might indicate something about my attitude towards sex and violence respectively, but I think these scenes matter more to the success of the show and to its humour. For a start, they tend to be funny in themselves.[iv] They’re also a good way of getting straight to the key themes of intimacy and gender identity.

Furthermore – though this is more speculative on my part – it might just be that relatively explicit sex has a different effect to violence, particularly when it’s presented in the fairly naturalistic manner of Girls. After all, many of us have had naturalistic sex with non-Beautiful People, whereas very few of us have seen a murder take place, let alone carried one out. In the context of a bittersweet contemporary comedy, the sex still has the power to shock, but it doesn’t feel as though it’s there for that purpose. Rather, it gives Girls a feeling of emotional honesty we can relate to, and without which the show would lose much of its charm. Sightseers is honest in its own way about the frustrations of everyday life, but the violence which results jars any fellow-feeling we might have for Tina and Chris.

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[i] This isn’t true of all cinematic violence. Sometimes the film requires graphic and even disturbing images (see A Prophet, Hidden, and what seems like half the cinematic output of Korea). None of these, it should be noted, are celebrated as works of comic genius.

[ii] With the exception of the episode involving knitting needles, about which I can say no more.

[iii] Which is not to say that any of the people involved are ugly. This is television, after all.

[iv] A better example is the scene discussed in the opening paragraphs of Elaine Blair’s thoughtful essay on the series.

Attack of the Memecats

Una Mullally’s brief summary of internet humour in one of the many, many round-up-of-the-year articles published last month (a filler of round-ups? A google? An impending Christmas party?) caught my eye. It’s little more than a throwaway comment, but the following in particular got me thinking:

The humour around such ventures is hit and miss, but there’s a jaded predictability to the insistence of laughing at and then spreading increasingly tired gags. Putting the “ah here, leave it out” Dublin holler over footage of an aircraft flying into the Twin Towers just isn’t funny. Neither is a guy looking into the camera on The Late Late Show. Or the laziness of Lolcat text over endless photographs of strange celebrity expressions.

Some gif-based Tumblrs – the scrapbook for a generation – actually yielded some laughs, in particular Dublin Gays and Hungover Owls. But there’s still the nagging sense that trawling through photographs of people who look like things is a colossal waste of time.[i]

I think this is mostly right: there is something about internet humour which tends to make it increasingly jaded and lazy. My best guess is that this is a combination of two broad but plausible generalisations. Humour made for the internet tends to have little depth or nuance. It must work almost instantly, getting a response in the second or two that we typically give to a gif or photo, or the thirty seconds that we might spend on a YouTube clip. That’s why so much of it relies on celebrities or riffs on other well-known clips or tropes such as Lolcat text. The pool from which successful memes are fished is very broad (broader than any previous source of comedy) but very shallow.

Second, successful ideas are reproduced. This isn’t new: everyone has had the experience of hearing the same joke from different people, and usually they won’t have independently come up with the same idea. The internet amplifies this effect, by increasing the number of people who see something amusing and wish to pass it on, and the numbers of individuals who want a slice of the comedy pie and have enough spare time and technical know-how to get involved.  

Something similar has happened in music: the number of people putting out recordings to a (potentially) mass audience is now far greater than ever before, and it’s difficult to see it decreasing in the near future. The means of production and distribution are no longer the exclusive property of a handful of large corporations. But in music, this increases the pressure to stand out by being different (principally by mixing together as many genres and textures as possible). In comedy, the most striking effect seems to be endless variations on existing themes. Ideas tend to get worn out by constant repetition; gems are buried in the landslide of cheap imitations.

That said, I wonder if Mullally’s criticism is a little too sweeping. After all, jokes (particularly short, memorable ones) have been repeated and generated spin-offs for a long time now, without well-established formats (‘What’s the difference between…?’ / ‘How many such-and-suches does it take…?’) becoming obsolete. The fact that there are a lot of bad memes circulating doesn’t make the pictures-of-people-who-look-like-things format, for example, a waste of time in and of itself. It does make the case for greater quality-control, but on the internet it was ever thus.

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[i] A number of these examples are specifically Irish, but as far as I can see they’re pretty representative of the world-wide web.

What is a Joke? A Dialogue (part 2 - part 1 can be found here)

 

(Note: this blog contains an extremely distasteful and offensive comment - I say 'comment' because whether or not it qualifies as a joke is the reason for its inclusion. Obviously I don't endorse said comment, etc.)

Dear Neil,

 

At the risk of appearing rather churlish in the face of interest from an actual member of the public, I’m not convinced by the equation. For one thing, I’m not sure what difference, if any, holds between ‘+’ and ‘*’. For another, although a joke will often feature all three elements, it seems possible to find jokes that don’t. A simple pun such as ‘Why was six scared of seven? Because seven eight nine’ works almost completely independently of any mood, and its subject matter appears to be nothing other than the potential for double meanings with which the English language, particularly when spoken aloud, is so blessed.

 

But the more general point about mood is well made. Here’s a very similar joke to the previous effort: ‘What did Freud think came between fear and sex? Funf’ There’s a bit more to this joke, for a few reasons – for one thing, the punning is between different languages. But it also involves a shift in what might be termed register, and which is at least close to what you refer to as ‘mood’: what appeared to be psychoanalytic totems are revealed as mere placeholders for wordplay. There’s a change in attitude which isn’t brought about by argument or derision, but by slyer and arguably more effective means. It’s a lot more subtle than the manipulation of mood Frankie Boyle is so good at, but it’s still there.

 

I think your suggestion of constants in the equation, i.e., elements present in every joke or ever good joke, is very interesting. I’m loath to speculate as to what these might be – that way lies the elephant’s graveyard of Theories of Humour – but I’m not so loath that I won’t throw around a couple of ideas for the sake of a blog post. One contender is probably wit (more or less the extra level of cleverness you mention). But witty things are not always funny, as the plays of Oscar Wilde so epigrammatically demonstrate, and not all funny jokes are clever (although interestingly, the best examples I can think of are probably from slapstick).

 

Another possibility is incongruity or the confounding of expectations, which was a criterion I suggested in my original article. Interestingly, I came across a possible counterexample to this recently, in Jim Holt's charming little volume Stop Me if You've Heard This Before. It's one of the few jokes, or attempted jokes, to have impacted on a national level - it cost then US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz his job when he was overheard making it on a flight from the Republican National Convention in 1976. It is, undoubtedly, quite something:

 

“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit”[i]

 

Obviously, this is a truly feeble attempt at humour. Holt comments:

 

“What is striking about the Butz joke, apart from its ugliness, is its dismal lack of art. It contains no paralogical twist, makes no unexpected conceptual links; it is merely a clumsy enumeration of racist stereotypes. (Indeed, it is recognisable as an intended joke only by dint of its formal observance of the Rule of Three.)”

 

I’m inclined to suggest that Butz’s comment is not a joke at all. In saying this, I’m not appealing to its crudely offensive nature. Many jokes are crudely offensive; indeed, revolting examples are only a couple of clicks away from this page. But this particular clumsy enumeration of stereotypes lacks the element of surprise, of the reader or audience having to draw a connection themselves, that seems to me to distinguish jokes from brute insults or offensive remarks.[ii] In short, there is no joke to get here. If there’s anything that characterises jokes, it’s that they can be ‘got’, much as commands can be obeyed or questions answered.

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[i] Interestingly, in each of the slightly different wordings I’ve read – this one is from Time – Butz is said to have used ‘coloreds’ rather than another well-known term for black people. Although one doubts he chose to phrase his point this way to avoid causing offence.

[ii] These can, unlike Bautz’s effort, themselves be witty: for instance (to continue the theme of 70s politics) Denis Healey’s famous remark that being criticised by Geoffrey Howe was like being savaged by a dead sheep. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t say that Healey had in this instance made a joke.

 

 

What is the Joke? A Dialogue

Dissecting the Frog reader and comic presence in his own right, Neil Wates, writes:

Interested to read your deconstruction of the Joke - something a lot of people (including myself) have been trying to get their heads round. I like your approach very much, particularly the point about subverting audience expectations, which reminds me of this masterful, masterful effort from Plum Wodehouse: 

 "Mr. Wooster, how would you support a wife?"

"Well, I suppose it depends on who's wife it was. A little gentle pressure beneath the elbow while crossing a busy street usually fits the bill."

The point I am interested in is what I am loosely terming the 'mood' of a joke (for now). Some of Frankie Boyle's worst stuff uses exactly the same linguistic and comedic conventions as the above, but the darker subject matter makes it a) seem like a different beast altogether and b) slightly funnier/less funny, dependant on your point of view. I guess what I am loosely grabbing at is that in the subjective world of jokes, there seems to be an equation going on where X = effectiveness of wordplay (into which we incorporate subversion of expectation, maybe), Y = subject matter, Z= Mood (or attitude toward subject matter). So, X+(Y*Z) = Joke, perhaps? Does that work?

I've been thinking about the linguistic value of some forms of comedy, not because I want to come up with some breakthrough theory or anything - just because it tends to ameliorate the joke if there is an evaluated extra level of cleverness (is this part of what we call ‘wit’?), though this is often one of the intangible/abstract reasons why one joke is supposedly 'better' than another. This is often completely separate from subject matter, which is noteworthy. I am not ignoring the completely wonderful subjectivity involved in all this, in fact I am trying to work out why linguistic layout effects jokes precisely because different people find different things funny. A fool’s errand it may be, but I have often wondered if there are one or two constants in the equation alongside the subjective variables of sense of humour, recipient's mood, context, experience etc etc.

It also hasn't escaped my notice that true to beautiful ironic absurdity there is some kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle effect: The more the linguistic tricks are appreciated the less obvious humour therein (for most except the nerdiest of nerds like you and I). Heisenberg's unfunny principle? Who knows. 

 

Neil Wates runs Monster Comedy, which has disappointingly little to do with monsters.