You Can Only Do It Once

Sometimes you come up with a truly clever joke.  It is really funny and everybody agrees.  Wonderful.  Tell that joke and get all the laughs you will from it.  And afterward, you can never do that joke again.

I don't mean to say that you can only tell a specific joke.  What I mean is that you can only tell that kind of joke once.  If you do a similar joke in the same vein, it rings hollow.

Back when I read the comics in the newspaper, one of the comics I read was Curtis.  Curtis is definitely a comic that has gone on for way too long.  I'm pretty sure it said everything it had to say a decade ago.  It seems to constantly reuse the same gags.  Dad hates Curtis's music, Curtis's crush will never reciprocate, and Curtis's younger brother will always be an annoying pest who often gets him in trouble.

I still remember when I realized I was done with that strip forever.  There was a comic where Curtis and his brother are walking down the street and Curtis opens the door to some building.  The brother is surprised because it was something extremely uncharacteristic for Curtis to care about (maybe a faith healing center).  Then Curtis explains that the store is a front.  They sell CDs of all the artists that parents never want their kids to listen to.  When the adults find out that the store is a front, they gather together and burn it down, then the store moves and puts up a new front.  The last-panel joke was basically that the CD had some shocking name.  It's not very funny to begin with.  So one day, I opened the paper, read Curtis, and it was that comic.  Again.  The only difference was the name of the front and the name of the CD.  It infuriated me.  I kept saying, "I've read this before."  It was such a BS cop out.  That joke is funny once (and it wasn't even funny once).  Doing it more than once is just beating a horse that died on its first time out of the stable.

I like the comic strip xkcd.  Part of the comic is that the characters are all stick figures.  One of my favorite strips is this one where he unveils "some new character art I'm working on!"  And you know what?  Randall Munroe has never used that joke again.  It is so easy to do, too.  Every time you do it, give them some feature, maybe a hat or some accessory.  But he hasn't done it.  And I am certain that one of the main factors is that he knows that doing it again would not be funny and would also take away from the power of the original.

Something special will stick out.  Something bland will blend in.  If you make something special, let it stay special.  Don't make it bland by making a bunch of copies of it (plenty of other people will already be willing to do that).