Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Get Ready For Funny

This post attempts to be funny. Most of the time people laugh their ass off, I'm not even trying! So imagine the hilarity now. I'm going to actually try to be funny. Watch how funny this is!

First up, let's try a joke. How do jokes work? Well, first you take a person, or a character of some kind, and you situate them in a situation that you sketch out, generally pretty sketchily, and then the situation develops and you put a spin on it, and that spin kind of brings in the unexpected - but generally in a way that we find reassuring, because it reinforces what we want to believe about the way the world is set up.

So, now that the ground rules are established, here comes the joke!

Bob has a wife and two dogs. He's at the bar, and he's a pipefitter for the local union. They send him out on jobs, unless that's not how it works. In which case, it works however it actually works - that part's not important to the joke. Anyhow, they sent him out on this one job - he's at the bar, he's telling the bartender about it. She's cute, about 20-40 years old, kinky hair of a shade about halfway between black and blonde, and Bob is telling her, in a you're-not-going-to-believe-this tone: "Shelia," (that's her name - it's Shelia, not Sheila) "Shelia, you're not going to believe this one." And he tells her this story about the job he went on. And she's a sympathetic ear or whatever, and then

Man, this is hard. I hope you guys appreciate the effort on this one! It's hard.

So, Shelia says "You gotta be kidding me! You're union aren't you? They can't do that."

And then Bob says...Bob says...

See, the problem here is, I'm not really sure how this whole thing works.

I'm going to have to re-think this. Was any of that funny?

Honestly, I have nooooo sense of humor whatsoever. Everyone says I've got a good one, but usually I'm like, "what was being laughed about, precisely?" Luckily, I don't say that out loud. I've got a pretty sweet rep to protect. Too many cracks like that would wreck it pretty quick!

Oooh! I know. I'll open it up to the commenters: best punchline wins! Have at it.

Also, if you haven't got a punchline for this joke, but you've got a good punchline for an as-yet-unwritten joke, that you'd like me to write the joke to, put those in too. I'll take a crack at it. Just specify in your comment whether the punchline is for this joke, or for a brand new joke you want me to write for you.

I think what we've seen here is that where I'm strong is writing the joke itself. But I'm weak on punchlines.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Bob says: Yeah, but what's my being married got to do with it?

JMH said...

I'm very much on the cusp of laughing, and maybe I'll try my hand at punchlines a bit later, but I thought you'd appreciate this:

Google "Philosopher's Playground." It's a blog, I'd link but I'm not sure how. Search the word "joke." I think you could contribute a lot to these comedy discussions and probably to the rest of them too.