Follow The Leader

I love telling jokes to my friends.  Well, they aren't so much jokes as they are groan-inducing puns.  But a good, awful pun loses all of its effect if the other person knows it's coming.  So it is very important that I throw them off-track.

I do have a formula of sorts.  When having a conversation with somebody, they say something which triggers my mind to come up with a pun.  Then I work backwards to come up with a premise that would warrant the pun as a punchline, and then I come up with an excuse to set up the premise.

For example, I was talking with a friend about war and peace (not the book) and my friend was saying how the absolute iconic imagery of the two at odds were the hippies putting the flowers in the barrels of the guns of military soldiers.  I agreed that it was definitely an iconic image, but it had become mangled because of how popular it was.  For example, you start wondering what would happen if you fired the gun.  Would it launch the flowers?  What if you put in several flowers so that it made a tighter seal?  It would be pretty cool though, if it did work.  I would start my own business where I would put bouquets in guns and fire them at people in a spectacular and beautiful fashion (a great fusion of war and peace).  I would call my business: Pistils at Dawn.

That was a lot of effort for that joke.  I had guns and flowers given to me, and I realized that 'pistil' was the pun to fuse them.  I had a common phrase, 'pistols at dawn', which could be used as the crucible for the fusion.  But I had to shift the subject several times over in order to reach the point that I had all the ingredients put together.

The beauty, though, is that it sounds more or less like a standard conversation, or at least a standard conversation with me.  So by the time I have lulled them into this false sense of security, I can smack them upside the head with my ridiculous pun.

It comes down to following the leader.  If I start a story that compels you, you will follow me.  You will trust that I am taking you down a path to an interesting revelation.  In the case of my puns, I am taking advantage of that trust for the sake of humor.  Whether one likes or appreciates that, the important point is that, as a good storyteller, you can gain that trust and instill that focus from your audience.  Getting that in the first place is key.

More on that tomorrow.