Problems Problems Problems - I See a Pattern

Emo Philips, Wanda Sykes, Mitch Hedberg, Rita Rudner and Steven Wright taught me how to write jokes. I just picked apart their work and looked for the patterns. Creativity is as simple as thinking of another solution. And how do you do that? Break it down. You look for the pattern.

So, how do you write jokes? For me, it was the same way I learned to read: pattern recognition.

I learned this from my school friend, Pete Maxmin, after I told him I didn’t know how to get an A in history. He told me to read his A grade essay. He said, ‘You don’t copy the essay, you copy the pattern.’ Like a dummy, I had thought the important thing about A-level history was learning about history. Nope. My friend Pete taught me how to break codes.

Jokes rely on it – that’s why it becomes a superpower for every comedian. The initial set-up (the context) is the bit that gets your brain to jump ahead (to make assumptions), which will then be subverted. Surprise is why we like jokes. With jokes there’s always something unexpected involved. You think it’s going to go in one direction but in fact it goes in BTS.

Intuitively, I broke jokes down. But then I started to do it on purpose. It would start with a joke that really made me laugh. I’d think, ‘That’s a funny idea. How did they construct it? Where did they start, what were they thinking?’ You might get the sense that maybe they started with that phrase . . . and then you reverse engineer it.

Here’s an example. After wordplay, the ‘rule of three’ is the easiest joke to recognise. The first line sets up the expectation, the second line confirms your assumption and then the third line surprises you by subverting your expectation. You can see the pattern is established and then subverted.

Does America really need to be the best at everything? You already dominate the world in economics, military power and obesity. – Trevor Noah

The Japanese toilet: it washes you, dries you, does your taxes. – Jim Gaffigan

Neurotics build castles in the air. Psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them. – Rita Rudner

I love jokes, they’re magical, it feels right that you ‘spell’ words. If you put certain words together in a certain order you get an incredible joyful response. I found I had a knack for writing jokes and the more I did it, the better I got. Joke writing is very freeing for me. Jokes that are very clearly jokes from the off meant I could go to all kinds of crazy places in the joke and no one minded. No one takes jokes seriously, it’s only when a joke is mistaken for an opinion that the trouble starts. Goddamn Twitter.

‘Never complain, never explain.’

Jimmy