Don't Take The Easy Jokes

In comedy, there are a lot of easy jokes to make. Sometimes they are the crude ones. Sometimes they are just the classic ones. In either case, I would advise against using them if you can avoid it.

There is a classic joke that just about every comic has made. It boils down to one character giving a long rant on a subject that serves no purpose but to make the speaker sound like an arrogant blowhard, immediately followed by a single phrase or action that completely makes the first character look like an idiot.

In practice, this situation is funny once, max. The problem with it is that it is wasteful. Since all of the speech is completely useless and only exists to build suspense toward the punchline, the audience completely wastes its time in reading it. I have come to the point that once I realize a strip is doing this tired bit, I just skip to the punchline and move on.

It makes you wonder why anybody would choose to do a joke so unfunny. Well, that's because it's easy. Wasting space is easy and generic slapstick is easy. Most people also have occasional glitches in their internal filter. Sometimes you think up this exact scene and it seems like quite the rib tickler. And, truth be told, if you go on the ride and really get into the strip, it is at least a little funny. The problem is that it requires so much work to get through the strip that I do not get sucked into it. I am not within the illusion, not under its spell, and that is why the strips are not funny.

Easy jokes are any joke that you see on a TV sit-com. If you watch a random episode of Friends and you can't predict at least 90% of the jokes, maybe you shouldn't be writing comedy. Those are nothing more than a collection of obvious set-ups and natural punch lines. The biggest indicator of an easy joke is that somebody says something so out of character or unrelated to the current subject that it can only exist to make a joke. Then all you do is think of any phrase that has the most obviously out of place word in it, and make a pun or other cheap joke.

The real problem with writing easy jokes, aside from the fact that they get old really fast, is that it prevents you from writing better jokes. If you're writing a comic strip, you only have room for one big punchline. If you take the easy joke, you don't have the room to put in another one.

Do yourself a favor and write a joke that you don't see coming. Take a little extra effort and it will show in your work.