Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Top 3 Jokes for Which I am Now Having a Funeral

First of all, thanks to anybody who came out to see The Calgary Whalers Present: the Deck last night, especially if you came out to see me because now we are best friends.  It was a good time all-around, and I was very happy with my own set overall.

If you came, you may have noticed that my last joke sucked.  It was a rare and unwarranted instance of me believing so hard in a joke that I actually tried it a second time after bombing with it once.  It will now be buried, along with another couple jokes that have recently bombed and I will now bury, just because that makes more than one thing on this list.  Also, if you have never seen me do stand-up, just trust me that I am hilarious and I am burying these jokes because they are my bad ones.  I would write my good jokes here but no they are mine you jerk and come see me perform some time to hear them.  Also, if you think you can turn these jokes into something funny, I give you artistic license to do so, because they're my ideas but I totally failed at it.

3. "I loved The Dark Knight, but when I saw it, people were clapping all the time.  I don't get why people clap at movies.  At a play, it makes sense, because the actors are all right there.  But in The Dark Knight, you're clapping for one of two people.  When stuff explodes or looks awesome, you're clapping for the director, Christopher Nolan.  He's not there.  He can't hear you.  And the other person in that movie you clap for...well, maybe he can hear you."

This is the one I sucked with last night.  I've tried it twice, and it's just never read right.  Last night, I got a bigger laugh out of asking, "Is The Dark Knight still relevant?" before I told the joke than I got with the actual thing.  I was so happy when I thought that I had written a good/smart Heath Ledger joke that I was blinded to the fact that it wasn't as funny or clear as I thought it was.  Also it'll stop being topical sometime soon if it hasn't already.  BURIED!

2. "I want to start a band called Former Member and break it up right away, just so I can be a former Former Member member.  Then I'm going to start a band that reenacts famous album jackets.  We'll be called the Cover Coverers.  Our shows will be no cover."

I think I'm just really poor at delivering this kind of Wright/Hedberg-ian wordplay one-liner humor.  Either that or it's just a crappy version of that.  I wrote part of this when I was listening to a lot of Wright and the other part when I was listening to a lot of Hedberg, and I think the lesson here is don't try to write jokes for other comics or maybe actually probably it's just "write better jokes you dumbass."  Unrelated: I only bombed with this joke once before deciding never to tell it again.  That was a few weeks ago.  BURIED!

1. "I think the worst job in the world is the guy who works at the Maytag call center.  It's actually his job to call people up on the phone and ask them if their refrigerator is running.  Nobody takes that guy seriously.  You know that with luck like that, his actual name is probably Mike Rotch, too."

I have a harder time figuring out why this one sucks than the others.  But it's another one I've bombed with twice, so it's being laid to rest.  Maybe people aren't familiar enough with the prank calls I'm referencing, or maybe they are, and it's just stupid and unfunny.  In any case, BURIED!

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