There are a number of things I suck at. Doing anything crafty tops the list, followed by shopping and anything requiring opposable thumbs.
Fourth is telling jokes. I recognize this is ironic-to-the-power-of-infinity given that I’m writing a humor book.
I was reminded of this last night, when my husband and I were watching an episode of the short-lived sitcom, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This series was Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The West Wing, and it features a behind-the-scenes look at a Saturday Night Live-ish show. The female lead is named Harriet; she is the co-anchor of the satirical news cast.
Here’s a clip of Harriet from the episode we just watched. She’s just won a comedy award and has learned that she must tell one joke when she accepts the award. This is her rehearsing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9Rst83JCz8]
(And if you watch at 2:02, I’ve mis-told the same Knock Knock joke in this precise manner).
My joke-telling abilities are worse than Harriet’s. Sure, I’m witty, I can write the occasional funny quip, and my sarcasm backhand usually scores.
But I can’t tell a joke.
In fact, my husband has been known to try to get me to tell a joke at parties. “Leanne,” he’ll say, “come here. Listen, everyone. Leanne is going to tell a joke.”
He knows I love an audience, so he’ll goad me until I agree. Only my attempt at telling a joke is the joke.
Here is a list of things that can go wrong:
- I move my lips while I rehearse the joke.
- I start with the punchline, but don’t realize this until the end.
- When I notice my audience is engaged, I take creative liberty and add my own flair. As always, I go too far.
- I rush it.
- I go too slowly.
- I forget it.
- I remember it, in the wrong order.
- I do weird body movements, such as rocking forward or looking off to one side.
- A jumbo jet lands on my head.
I specialize in destroying A-Man-Walks-into-a-Bar jokes.
Here is an example, unrehearsed. Warning, this will be the longest 96 seconds of your day.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVanpoh6QgY]
P.S. My husband watched this and strained a muscle in his back from laughing so hard. To quote him, “you messed that up in more than 9 ways.”
Your turn:
What’s your favorite joke to tell or mis-tell?
What do you suck at?
(Bloggers, feel free to do your own Humiliation Station post)
Thanks for the Monday morning chuckle!! I’m also completely hopeless at telling jokes and like you, me attempting to tell a joke IS the joke. Glad to see I’m in good company. 🙂
You write absolutely hilarious anecdotes though, so keep it up! Congrats also on the book deal!
Thanks, Niki. If we lived closer, we should get together and laugh at ourselves. Over wine. Or whine.
Is your standup training helping in any way?
I don’t even attempt jokes, especially with adults. I have one go-to joke with the kids that I use when I’m trying to get some authentic smiles in pictures rather than the pained frog-face smiles:
What do porcupines say when they kiss? OUCH!!!
This usually gets them laughing (positive) and rolling around dramatically on the ground (less positive).
And I liked that Studio 60 show.
Ha. The stand-up training is actually amazing – at least the joke-writing part. I do better when I write the joke. Or that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
And I am so stealing that porking joke. I mean the porcupine joke.
And by the way, we both belong in a writing room like Studio 60.
Perhaps shorter less complex jokes? Maybe. Yeah. *laughing*
By the way, that great smile of yours is more distracting then the hat. Facial features and expression are often half of what is needed to pull off a joke. The rest is wit and timing. I’d say you have two out of three, so keep trying 🙂
Another one of my joke-telling problems is that I laugh at my own jokes. I don’t do this with made-up jokes, though. But on the ones I write, I figure someone has to laugh.
Thanks for the kind-ish words. 😉
What’s the best time to go to the dentist?
Tooth hurtie.
Okay, this made me laugh out loud. It did. Tooth hurtie. Rather sad that I’d likely say “three hurtie” if I retold it.
Okay. You do win the humiliation award, but only because you had video!
p.s. Was that shower cap a nod to my hat post? Because that is actually one of the few hats that will fit me…
It’s actually a surgical cap that I stole from my sister who works in an OR. That’s our healthcare dollars at work.
I am going to add Humiliation Award to my book proposal.
Almost anyone can tell a joke. Not everyone can write well.
🙂
That is so funny. The actual joke is really good.
That banana joke is my son’s favourite and he taught it to his little sister. It was the first joke she ever learned so now she thinks all jokes go around and around with the knock knock part.
Circular knock knock jokes. I believe they’re their own sub-genre.
That actually was quite painful.
Try, “A dyslexic walks into a bra” and leave it at that.
To go to a really geeky extreme, “A fat quark walks into a bar, BARTENDER: You look Charming today”… A handfull of people get that joke and they all have hadrons right now
You are so wonderful just the way you are. Don’t go changin’
Never underestimate my ability to ruin jokes, even the 6 word ones.
I don’t get the other joke.
And now Billy Joel is stuck in my head. 🙂
BWAHAHha ha ha…the charmed particles, dood.
The color series still have me perplexed. Not up on my Baryons these days, either.
Gravitons. C’mon… it’ll never happen.
I think It’s the joke’s fault. My favorite joke takes 5 minutes to tell, so I never tell it. I usually just end up telling embarrassing stories…
Yes, I think I’ll stick to anecdotes or jokes I make up…
Two baby seals walk into a club…
Ha! And a nice (or not-so-nice) Canadian angle…
i tell great jokes — i learned them all from my husband. He’s a fantastic joke teller. Unfortunately, we’re always together so he interrupts my jokes (his jokes) and finishes them for me and then HE gets the laughs. I feel like Gracie Allen sometimes…
My favorite jokes are so completely un-PC that I have to be really careful of the audience. Because, you know, everyone gets offended at comedy now.
That sucks. It’s like preparing an entire meal, including the marinade, the salads, the dessert. A man flips the meat once on the barbecue and suddenly he’s cooked dinner.
I’m not bitter about this at all.
And un-PC? Nearly all of my Halloween costumes pre-30 were that.
Best line? Listening to Harriet trying to tell a joke is “like watching a drunken man cross an icy street.”
Current favourite joke?
A woman gets on a bus and the driver…hang on, do-over.
A woman and her BABY get on a bus, she’s holding her baby…hang on…
A woman, holding her baby, gets on a bus. The bus driver looks at the baby and says, “Well, that is the ugliest baby I have ever seen!”
The woman, furious, stomps to the back of the bus and sits down. She turns to the man beside her and says, “That bus driver just insulted me!”
The man says, “Oh, you poor thing, that’s terrible. You go right back there and tell him off. Here, let me hold your monkey for you.”
I am killing myself laughing, P!
It’s like watching a drunken guy cross an icy street…
(or something like that. I can’t remember exactly. and now I’m wondering if the drunk guy is Jewish. or maybe he has his mouth full. crap.)
Of course, I would say it’s like an icy guy crossing a drunken street.
You may not be able to tell a joke, but you sure make me laugh! I have many of the same deficiencies in joke-telling – maybe that’s why I think you’re so funny! 🙂 I’ve decided that I’m just supposed to be the one who laughs at others’ jokes.
Thanks, Kim. I will always prefer the impromptu joke…
I’m going to stick with your choice of topic:
“We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here”, said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.
LOL!
Hee hee! Thanks for the chuckle today. I can’t remember jokes so I don’t even try. I do bring the hilarity with my one-liners, however.
I bet you do! Someday we’ll meet and laugh together. Or at me. I’m okay with that.
Here’s more weird proof that we are eerily alike in strange ways. I, too, cannot tell a joke. If I happen to remember a joke (rarely), I botch it. Badly.
I also mangle cliches. Like when attempting to say, “He’s a big fish in a little pond,” I instead came out with, “He’s a small fish in an even smaller bowl.”
I’ve learned to recognize the signs that I’ve just said something inadvertently not-quite-right when my conversation partner suddenly pastes a very generic smile on her face and starts backing off slowly. My husband finds it all totally hilarious.
I’m afraid my son has inherited my faulty joke/cliche gene. Or else he has a thoroughly post-modern, deconstructionist view on humor. For instance.
Andrew: knock-knock
Me : Who’s there?
Andrew: Monkey
Me: Monkey who?
Andrew: The monkey has thrown away his bananas and is taking calcium chews. (He laughs uproariously, while I back away slowly with a generic smile pasted on my face). Later I console myself that he’ll be the next Foucault or Derrida, a post-post humorist.
Love the piece (and the surgical hat)
Rebecca
I love Andrew. And post-post humorists. Brilliant. Seriously: how had I not met you before October?
That 80’s montage totally makes up for the inability to tell jokes.
Love it!
I suck at doing mental math. Even the simplest problems.
Mental math is actually something I like. But you’re right: I’m much better at backcombing my hair than telling canned jokes. 🙂
Quick: how many years ago was 1984?
Kidding…
They take a well developed show like Studio 60 off the air (I realy liked it, too) yet leave on the crappo (like Real Housewives). Anyway, I, too, am a bad joke-teller. I always forget the key parts, or just the joke, period. My brain just doesnt seem to have any storage capacity for jokes. I only remember one joke. And it’s off-color, of course. Learned it when Iwas maybe 9 years old… Thank you for sharing your humiliation with us all.
I know. So true. SportsNet was another good, short-lived Sorkin show (pre The West Wing).
And…it was my masochistic pleasure to share my humiliation…
I suck at joke telling, too. Frankly, I only have one: A woman goes to her psychiatrist and says, “Doctor! Doctor! I think I think I’m a teepee. The doctor said, “Relax, you’re too tense (tents).” Get it? It’s punny. 😉
I heart you. You know, for explaining it to me. 🙂
You were nowhere near as bad as Harriet. I think the joke was king of cute. So, no worries. One of these days you’ll get it right! 😉
Monica, you are too kind. Really!
A pirate walks into a bar and he has a steering wheel attached to his crotch. He walks up the bartender and the bartender asks, “why do you have a steering wheel attached to your crotch?” The pirate says, “Arrrr it’s driving me nuts.”
AH, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!
You can’t even begin to imagine the ways I could mess up that joke.
I keep playing the “Ahhhh!” at :42 seconds. Cracking up!
Well, 42 is the meaning of life…
:–P
Yes, Leanne, I have to agree, joke telling is not your forte… just goes to prove that verbal skills and writing skills are NOT necessarily connected! And there are 2 reasons I say this: 1. Congratullations on the agent and the book! I can’t wait to have you on my shelf!
2. Something I’ve been meaning to tell you about for a while.. I was going through a (very) old pile of Globe and Mail’s, catching up on my2-year list of “Things to Do”, (note: I am not quite ready to go on a hoarding show yet, but if my newspaper pile keeps growing, I might consider it), and I was reading a “Lives Lived” column and thinking how good the writing was, and when I got to the bottom and read the author’s name, realized that I knew this person! So, belated though it may be, I also have to pass on my admiration for the great job you did of remembering your maternal grandfather. (Better late than never, I always say!)
Cheers!
Wow, Margaret, thanks for commenting.
That Lives Lived piece was one of the most important pieces of writing (to me) that I’ve written. I think I’m going to go reread it now.
You made me smile.
Oh, Leanne you made me HOWL! I sure needed a laugh, so thanks a ton!
I have an amazing idea. You record yourself telling all your best jokes, and I will watch them. Since I similarly screw up jokes, maybe, just maybe, I can rearrange it and actually be able to tell the joke right. At least one of us might look good in the process.