Misdirection

What makes a thing hilarious? Not just worthy of a little chuckle, but the sort of thing that causes grown men to spit beer out their nose?

There's a setup and a punchline, but why do they work together to form a perfect whole? That's a damn tough target to hit.

“Trying to write jokes again, eh?”

It's your brother on the phone, calling at the worst possible time. He has disrupted your timing, the key to every comic's success. Without precision placement of words and actions, we are nothing. It's a lot like baseball. The hitter tries to time pitches thrown by a man trying to disrupt that timing.

“Let me guess, it's not going so well.”

Maybe you start with a certain scenario that brings with it certain expectations. And you build your story around those expectations, point everything toward a conclusion that seems inevitable. Then at the last second you reveal a twist that both surprises and satisfies. You disrupt reality, misdirect in a way that doesn't feel like cheating.

“Stop thinking about it so much and just do it.”

A guy walks into a bar. What guy? What bar? Why do we invest our time and energy into this stuff?

“Still thinking about it too much.”

Your brother is right, as usual. He isn't hilarious, or even worthy of a little chuckle, he's just right. It's irritating beyond description.

So you start dreaming up punchlines: That's not even my car. Yeah, you don't know the half of it. At least I still have a stove.

They're not funny out of context. And maybe they're not funny in context. You don't know because there's no joke, which becomes its own joke.

Did you hear about the comic who couldn't write jokes?

“No.”

He sucked.