Readers, I’d like you to know I was followed just yesterday by members of the #StopMichael movement. I could feel them lurking behind me for 10 minutes before I turned back to see the entirety of The Really Independent Florida Crocodile editorial staff. They satirized the daylights out of me. No dead horse went unbeaten that day.
As such, I’ve made further strides to change my appearance. My beard is now shaven. Gone. Cleaved off in one fell swoop with a butcher’s knife. Good luck finding me now, radicals.
What makes a cheap joke? What elicits a cheap laugh? We can all agree cheap jokes exist, right? What kinds of jokes rob us of our artistic integrity? Jerry Seinfeld would argue profanity taints a joke. Profanity and sex are inherently funny because they’re taboo, and Seinfeld says a comedian should earn that laugh; you don’t have to rely on swearing in your routines. Meanwhile, comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin have made careers and defined generations with profanity, as I discussed last week. Rodney Dangerfield’s signature comedy album “No Respect” is full of profanity — and it’s masterful. Give it a listen. It’s dope.
From 1976 to 1984, cartoonist Stuart Hample wrote the syndicated comic strip, “Inside Woody Allen,” which mimicked Woody Allen’s style of comedy.
Throughout its syndication, Allen would advise Hample to never pander to the audience. Allen wanted to carve a niche in the comics, but Hample’s publishers wanted more mainstream, broad humor. Allen pushed for highbrow esoteric references. He pushed for frank discussion of death and sex. He pushed Hample to change the medium of the comic strip. And as a result, no one’s ever heard of “Inside Woody Allen.”
Allen proposes the notion that “cheap jokes” stem from uninteresting content. If the joke is about something elementary, it’s not a clever joke.
Seinfeld proposes something different, though. He suggests that “cheap jokes” stem from poor structure: How do you tell the joke?
If you have to rely on profanity to cover up a poorly paced joke, it’s not a very clever joke. If you can speak eloquently and let every word contribute to the punchline, then the joke is clever and stimulating.
In the past, I have also addressed the duality of a joke’s content and a joke’s structure. They are two separate entities. A joke can look good on paper, but if it’s delivered or paced poorly, it’s no longer funny. Conversely, we’ve all met folks who we deem “naturally funny” because they possess a certain charisma.
Where was I going with all this?
So, generic content and traditional structure create cheap comedy. Can we define both “generic content” and “traditional structure”? Let’s try. Well, generic content so far seems to be taboo subjects: sex, drugs and profanity. This is the kind of stuff we all laugh at because we all live in a society that deems them taboo.
What about “traditional structure”? Well, we all know one traditional joke structure: the knock-knock joke.
But more importantly, when I think of a cheap joke I think of “shock value.”
I think we’re all familiar with what that means and how its connotation differentiates it from “subversion of expectation.” Shock value is the middle-schooler who swears on the playground because it’s edgy. Shock value is every Seth Rogen movie ever. Shock value is pushing societal boundaries without advocating a positive message.
Shock value is the epitome of a cheap joke.
How did this take 600 words? I feel pretty foolish. But, I’m glad I answered that. I feel like any schmuck on the street could have more eloquently stated the definition of a cheap joke, though. Good thing I’m not a schmuck. Right?
Michael Smith is a fresh UF comical engineering man. His column runs in 12 countries and is banned for frank discussion of Michael Smith in 26 of them.
