There must be a trillion ways to tell a joke. Today, lucky for you, I’m going to explain how to tell the fundamental ones. The trillion others will have to wait for another post.
Before we get into “how” to deliver any basic joke, we need to define some terms.
Rhythm/Pace: The speed with which you talk.
Timing: The amount of time you give the audience to understand the set up of your joke before delivering the punch line. (Check my previous post on timing for a three minute explanation.)
Beat: The approximate time of a heartbeat.
Pitch: The tone/note, either high or low, of your voice.
Operative word: The word you put the stress/emphasis on.
Now that we’re philosophically sound, lets break down how a joke works at its fundamental level. In fact we’re going to do it in gibberish, so we don’t get tripped up in the meaning of words.
(Spoken at a chill conversational pace) Buh dum, buh dum, buh dum, buh dum, buh dum (beat) (and now spoken faster with a higher pitch) BuhDAHdum.
TADA! Jokes.
So what happened in all that?
To begin, the pace is even keeled and conversational. This sets our baseline with which we can deviate from when it comes to our punchline.
How does this work in practice?
Breathe. Slow all the way down and speak as if you were telling someone about your flight itinerary to your next conference.
What are those stars over the last “dum”?
That’s your “operative word”. What word you emphasize can change the meaning of a sentence in a blink. I present you the greatest operative word sentence ever constructed.
“I never put a squirrel up my ass”
Sit with that for a moment and examine how each emphasis changes the meaning. My favorite is “put”. There is so much unspoken possibility in that choice.
Let’s give an example with a simple joke. “I want to die like my grandfather. Peaceful and in my sleep. Unlike the screaming people in his car.” The operative word here is “sleep”. The last word in the set up, just before the punchline. Which, in well written jokes is where it tends to fall. This reading comes to most of us intuitively, but it must be highlighted, because messing with expectations is something we’re going to come to a while later in this long string of essays. In the meantime, notice that if someone placed the emphasis on “MY” we’d be wondering why to reemphasize that point. Is the joke now about your feeling of pride that your grandfather died while driving other people?
What’s the “(beat)”?
The “beat” I previously explained, but for todays purposes, it’s just giving the audience some time to “get” the set up and add a little suspense. So, just before the punchline, give a heartbeats worth of time before delivering the punchline.
And now, the Holy Grail. The Punchline. We change pace to faster and change pitch to higher. If you doubt me, watch a sitcom.
Voila. Now you know how to tell a joke.