Have You Heard the One About...?
For someone who professes to
be in comedy, I’ve only written three jokes in my life.
That’s not an impressive statistic. I should up my game. My current gag productivity averages out at one every eleven years of my life. I’ll be long dead before I’ve built up enough to fill a joke book. I’ll be lucky to work up a pamphlet.
I’m just not a set-up-and-punchline person. It’s all right occasionally, but isn’t really to my taste. I prefer comedy based around a situation or an observation to simple wordplay. That's why I’m a big fan of Hancock’s Half Hour. While there’s plenty of funny dialogue, it’s mostly character-driven. The roles of Tony and Sid are so well defined that the humour comes from knowing how they think.
The same applies to stand-up. I prefer the storytelling of, say, Phil Kay, to the scattergun one-liners of Tim Vine. Knob gags are my only weakness.
That said, a simple joke does have its place. Here are three Ephgrave originals. Two of them I quite like. One I came up with earlier this week. All three are best read out loud.
That’s not an impressive statistic. I should up my game. My current gag productivity averages out at one every eleven years of my life. I’ll be long dead before I’ve built up enough to fill a joke book. I’ll be lucky to work up a pamphlet.
I’m just not a set-up-and-punchline person. It’s all right occasionally, but isn’t really to my taste. I prefer comedy based around a situation or an observation to simple wordplay. That's why I’m a big fan of Hancock’s Half Hour. While there’s plenty of funny dialogue, it’s mostly character-driven. The roles of Tony and Sid are so well defined that the humour comes from knowing how they think.
The same applies to stand-up. I prefer the storytelling of, say, Phil Kay, to the scattergun one-liners of Tim Vine. Knob gags are my only weakness.
That said, a simple joke does have its place. Here are three Ephgrave originals. Two of them I quite like. One I came up with earlier this week. All three are best read out loud.
1)
What’s
do you call a video of some toads having sex? Frogspawn.
2)
What do
you get if you contract HIV through your ears? Hearing AIDS.
3)
Henry
VIII’s second wife would never rush into a room. She’d just amble in.
I’m aware that the first two need work. The last one is my nest egg. If only I’d been born five hundred years earlier, I'd be quids-in. That, or in the Tower of London.
