Planet Funny

From Chapter 2: Funny for No Reason

The observation that dissection can kill a joke shouldn't surprise us; it's just one special case of the general truth that almost anything can kill a joke. At lunch one day, a friend and I started trading fondly recalled stories from the Onion. We quickly realized that neither of us were making the other laugh with our favorite headlines—because we weren't quite remembering them perfectly. You'd think that something as tight and elemental as an Onion headline ("Drugs Win Drug War," "New Dog Digs Up Old Dog," "Trophy Wife Mounted") would be idiot-proof, but no. Even a conceptual joke like their famous 2008 Obama headline, "Black Guy Asks Nation for Change," needs to have every word just right, or there's really no point. "Black Candidate Wants"—no, wait. "Black Man Wants Change." "Black Guy Says He Needs Some—" Hold on. Shit.

The jokes seemed simple, but their simplicity had evidently been the result of long and careful effort. They were murdered by paraphrase. Everyone remembers E.B. White's frog comparison in "Some Remarks on Humor," but the very next sentence of the same essay is probably a better analogy: he compares jokes to soap bubbles. Humor, he says, "won't stand much blowing up, and it won't stand much poking. It has a certain fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect."

When you think about how many different ways there are to kill a joke, it's a wonder that they evolved at all. Chaplin's famous dictum that "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot" is essentially an admission that the exact same joke can succeed or fail depending on an accident of geography: how close to the subject you're standing. You can confirm this by watching any Jacques Tati movie, where gags precisely line up to the edge of the frame or some piece of the scenery. The viewer is watching the action from the one point in the universe where it's funny. Animator Chuck Jones once quantified the exact margin of error on one of his most famous jokes: Wile E. Coyote, when falling off a cliff, had to hit bottom exactly fourteen frames after he disappeared from sight. "It seemed to me that thirteen frames didn't work in terms of humor, and neither did fifteen frames. Fourteen frames got a laugh."

The implication is that one-twenty-fourth of a second, the flap of a hummingbird's wings, is enough to kill a joke. I was skeptical when I first read Jones tell an interviewer this; it seemed more like mystique-making than actual animation know-how. But I changed my mind after seeing the effect firsthand. One day after taping a Jeopardy! tournament on the Sony lot, I got a text from a friend, who happened to be doing the final sound mix for a Simpsons episode at a nearby stage. I walked over to say hi on my way to dinner, and ended up staying for over an hour, mesmerized by the fine-tuning of an animated sitcom. A writer could suggest something like, "Can the music be more dramatic here but, like, twenty percent less ominous?" and I would roll my eyes in the dark. But then the engineer would do something to the bass and the drums, and when we watched it again, a miracle would occur: the scene would play funnier. Matt Groening himself was at the mix, which surprised the hell out of me, and at one point he quibbled about the sound made by an attacking Japanese-style robot. "The lion's roar is good, but it should do it three times, in quick succession." Again, this seemed like gibberish, but the next time the robot attacked, the identical triplet ("ROAR! ROAR ROAR!") made me laugh out loud.

If moving a camera one foot to the left or delaying a sound effect by a fraction of a second can hamstring humor, you can only imagine what the ravages of time and distance can do to a joke. At any performance of Shakespearean "comedy" today, you'll have a hard time mustering a genuine chuckle at the zany Elizabethan antics of the clown. "Aha, he's thrusting his hips and leering at the crowd! That must have been a sex joke!" It doesn't take five hundred years, either. Watch a typical sitcom from the 1950s, and then watch something from the same era that was dead serious when it was written—an advertisement for cream of wheat, an educational film about good hygiene. Guess which one gets bigger laughs today? It's not fair, but unintentional humor just has a longer shelf life than the intentional kind. Booth Tarkington summed up this Bizarro-world effect of old-timey humor perfectly: "Antique funnyings in print bring on a pleasant melancholy."

Translation across languages is an even more immediate way to see the fragility of humor. Take this Steven Wright one-liner.

I went into a place to eat, it said, "Breakfast anytime." So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.

It isn't a complicated joke, but just try to tell it in Spanish. First of all, you face the problem that many Spanish-speaking cultures don't exactly have diners. Their closest analogue to a diner might not serve breakfast all day. And their closest analogue to a diner that serves breakfast all day might not announce "Breakfast anytime" on a sign or menu. And even if it did, you're going to have a language problem. In English, we use the same word—"time"—to mean both "time of day" and "historical period," and the joke hinges on that ambiguity. But in Spanish, these are separate words: hora and época, respectively.

In other words, the old maxim that "comedy is the universal language" could not be further from the truth. Jokes are the rainforest orchids of the artistic world, too delicate to survive most travel or transplantation. The great all-time international movie stars—Sophia Loren, Toshiro Mifune, Catherine Deneuve, Max von Sydow—are dramatic actors, because good looks and screen presence are near-universal, but every country seems to have some comedy superstar who is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world: Toto in Italy, Cantinflas in Mexico, Louis de Funès in France. The weird French embrace of a foreign-born Jerry Lewis or Woody Allen is the exception, not the rule. And the divide is culture as much as it's language: I've labored mightily to include non-American comedians among the examples in this book, only to face the dispiriting fact that almost no non-American comedy is universal across the English-speaking world. Americans say they love that quirky British sense of humor, but they can name maybe five British comedy people tops, and one of them is Benny Hill.

When funniness gets lost in translation, I suspect that the fault often lies with lazy translators, who are too quick to boot a joke as "untranslatable" rather than cast about for a better alternative. As I was thinking about telling the French toast joke in Spanish, for example, I realized there is a single word that can be used to mean both kinds of time: momento. That might not be enough to save the joke, but it's a start. Sometimes, more radical surgery is required to get laughs to travel across boundaries of time and place. I saw a performance of Macbeth at London's Globe Theatre in 2016 where the famous "knocking at the gate" scene, comic relief after the bloody murder of Duncan, broke with Shakespearean tradition by actually being funny. Every night, the actress playing the porter had been given free rein to improvise jokes about Donald Trump, Brexit, and whatever else was in the headlines. Watching her, I remembered reading an article about how Germans in the mid-1990s discovered a new favorite TV show: Hogan's Heroes. The thirty-year-old American sitcom, set in a Nazi POW camp, had never found an enthusiastic audience in Germany, for some reason. But in 1995, a German broadcaster commissioned a new dub, with broader, sillier humor nowhere to be found in the English-language original (and, naturally, less likely to bear any actual resemblance to World War II). In the newly christened Ein Käfig voller Helden ("A Cage Full of Heroes"), a plan to bomb London in one episode became a plot to drop condoms there, cutting off the British war effort via population control. The German Colonel Klink now made frequent references to Kalinka, a never-seen cleaning lady in his employ who works in the nude. The reimagined show became a smash hit, drawing almost a million viewers a day. Are loose translations like these cheats? Or are they the only faithful way to translate comedy, because at least they preserve the laughs?

The observation that some jokes are "referential" and can survive translation, while others are "verbal" and cannot, goes back to Cicero. But referential humor can fail too, as soon as the references fade. Here's a joke that was insanely popular in Egypt in 1968.

A man narrowly misses a bus, and takes off down the street in pursuit. He's so fast that he catches up with the bus at the end of the block, and hops aboard. The conductor, seeing this feat, only charges him half-fare.

That's it. That's the joke.

Feel free to close this book for a few hours or weeks or years and ponder the punch line—it will get you nowhere. I'm confident that you could spin theories about the bus joke indefinitely and never even get close to the gist of it. It's French toast during the Renaissance, specific to a single time and place. To understand it, you need to know three crucial pieces of information that Egyptians in 1968 would have known off the top of their heads:

Military personnel pay half fares on Egyptian city buses.
Egypt in 1968 had just lost the Six-Day War to Israel in decisive and demoralizing fashion.
As a result, jokes were often powered by the stereotype of the cowardly Egyptian soldier, the kind of jokes that got told about the Italians a century ago and are still heard about the French today.

Now you can probably piece it together: the conductor saw how fast the man was running, realized that only a soldier who had recently been running away from the Israeli army could be so fleet of foot, and charged him the soldier's discount. Now you're laughing!

The fragility of comedy means that it's always transitory, and therefore doomed. The addition of a few catchy tunes can resurrect a timeworn piece of tragedy like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables or Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" into a worldwide phenomenon, but that just doesn't happen to comedy. When comedy is dead, it's dead. No professionally funny person wants to face this truth, but their very best work, the stuff that left millions rolling in the aisles, will leave no legacy. At the time Booth Tarkington was lamenting "antique funnyings," he was perhaps the leading humorist in America, acclaimed as the successor to Mark Twain for his Penrod stories of Midwestern boyhood. Today, he's an antique funnying himself. The Penrod books have been out of print for decades.

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