“Why are comedians such good liars? How hard do they work on their jokes? And how important is… timing? Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves explain the rules.”
From the Telegraph:
They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.
Bob Monkhouse
This Monkhouse gag is funny but, of course, it’s much better heard than read. On paper, a joke is a pale and inadequate one-dimensional version of itself. In fact, a joke scarcely exists until someone has told it and someone else has laughed.
The who, where, when, what and why of a joke’s telling can be more significant that its topic, and no single theory – from Freud’s notion of the joke as a release of suppressed sexual neurosis to Schopenhauer’s definition of humour as a reaction to incongruity – can explain how jokes work.
Even comedy’s greats seem stuck for a proper analysis. When John Cleese tired of questions about where he got his jokes from, he resorted to, ‘I buy them from a little man in Swindon.’ The truth is much more prosaic. Jokes are about 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent whittling and crafting – much of it in front of an audience.
More here.