The Secrets of Comedy

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved to tell jokes. Puns, riddles, shaggy dog stories, one-liners: didn’t matter to me so long as I could get a reaction from an audience.

I can remember waiting eagerly for each new issue of Jack & Jill magazine so that I could devour the latest jokes and riddles. It’s almost two generations later and I can still remember Q: Why is your heart like a policeman? A: Because it follows a regular beat.

I remember watching Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. At the end of the show, the regulars and, often some surprise guests, would appear from behind brightly painted doors and deliver jokes and riddles that were structured like those in Jack & Jill. I know now that I couldn’t have understood most of what they were talking about, but I do recall getting caught up in the laughter. Here were people like Goldie Hawn and Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson & Ruth Buzzi trading jokes with Vaudeville-trained past masters like Red Buttons and Milton Berle and everyone just seemed like they were having fun making one another laugh. In the same way that I committed the Jack & Jill material to memory, I would study Laugh-In and remember the jokes so I could tell them to kids at school.

Sexual permissiveness is the problem with today’s children, but if it hadn’t been for sexual permissiveness, we wouldn’t even have today’s children.

Clearly, my comedy was way too avant-garde, which is a polite way of saying that I wasn’t funny.

In his book “Born Standing Up”, Steve Martin captures my Cliff Notes approach to comedy in this one story:

"OK, I don't like to gear my material to the audience, but I'd like to make an exception, because I was told that there is a convention of plumbers in town this week—I understand about 30 of them came down to the show tonight—so before I came out, I worked up a joke especially for the plumbers. Those of you who aren't plumbers probably won't get this and won't think it's funny, but I think those of you who are plumbers will really enjoy this. This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job, and he started working on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch gangly wrench. Just then this little apprentice leaned over and said, 'You can't work on a Findlay sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch wrench.' Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got Volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and he reads to him and says, 'The Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Findlay sprocket.' Just then the little apprentice leaned over and says, 'It says sprocket, not socket!' [Worried pause.] "Were these plumbers supposed to be here this show?"

There is an elegance to a well-crafted joke that connects with both the brain and the funny bone. The listener is drawn in by the premise, surprised by the punchline and brought to laughter in less time than it takes to explain how to use a telephone.

I remember coming across a record by Nipsey Russell who made a name for himself by retelling fairy tales. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old when I heard this, but it is a perfect example of a well-crafted one-liner:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe, She had so many children she didn’t know what to do…. Apparently.

I told that joke for years before I ever understood what it meant.

Mastering the well-turned phrase was and is an important rite of passage in my family.

I have written about this before and I am still not sure where it came from. It’s not as though we would sit around in the evening and read to one another from Oscar Wilde. In fact, I would venture that we were the very model of a post-literate family. In keeping with so many of my generation, my brother, sister and I were raised by television and movies.

The reality may have been somewhat different, but what I recall is that for a family we lead remarkably separate lives. My brother was and is very kinesthetic, always moving through space. We would watch episodes of The Green Hornet and he would want to practice a martial arts move he had seen Bruce Lee do and I would have to be his dummy.

It would be easy to describe myself as the bookish writer type, but I really wasn’t. I have always been a dreadfully slow reader and writing for any length of time makes my hands cramp. Everything I know about good writing and great ideas I learned in the same way I learned about comedy: by repeating someone’s else’s material.

My sister has the best balance of traits from my mother and my father: she has brains, she has grace and she has more personality than should really be legal. Whereas my brother and I both tend to put people on edge—my brother because he looks and moves like he has a temper and me because, given the opportunity, I look like I would try and sell you some software, or explain a particularly compelling plot point from Star Trek—my sister can put people immediately at their ease. She wields her personality like a spotlight transforming those on whom it is focused.

I won’t pretend to speak for my siblings, but I know that as I was growing up I spent a lot more time around adults than I did around peers. At the time I didn’t mind one bit: it seemed like my brother was always using me for judo practice and my classmates, by and large, were making fun of my weight.

My parents had funny friends and I remember the steady stream of laughter coming from the living room.

My dad often brought friends and co-workers home from the office and they would de-brief over drinks as my mother and the children would eat our dinner in the nearby kitchen. We had a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room that lead to the living room and it would swing open for refills and it would swing open for calls for my mother to join the guests, and it would swing open to use the telephone to call another kitchen to explain when someone or another would be home.

Once I learned how to pour a drink and could remember to keep the ice cube trays filled, I got to spend more time in the room. My dad’s friends were quick and funny and absolutely merciless.

To me, comedy equaled power: the ability to make someone laugh. In the same way that I studied Laugh-In, I knew there was something to learn from my father and his rogues gallery even if I didn’t understand it.

Growing up, I spent a lot of hours with my father. Hours past my bedtime when he would be eating a foil-wrapped dinner that had been left for him in the oven, or having a bowl of ice cream and corn syrup before turning in. Hours standing by waiting for him to ask for a tool from his tool box, or some part from his workshop. In all that time I don’t think I ever got to know him very well.

One of my father’s sayings was “children should be seen and not heard.” And by “seen” that meant on his schedule and not ours. My dad was not one to come to school functions, or meet the teacher nights, but he would get me up early on the weekend and take me to out of the way places that he had heard about where they made good sausage, or did quality iron work, or there was a tractor for sale that he wanted to see.

We never really talked all that much and certainly never had any of those father-son talks that I would see on TV or at the movies. I remember trying to ask him for some advice about a girl when I was in high school and my overwhelming impression was that instead of bringing us closer together, it just made him uncomfortable.

I don’t mean to suggest that my dad didn’t love his family, I’m just not sure that he knew what to do with us.

As I was growing up, there were times that I thought my dad was mean when he would be laughing with his friends one minute and making my mom cry the next. I know differently now, but, like the Old Woman in the Shoe joke, it took time and experience to reach that “understanding.”

I say “understanding”, but it’s guesswork really. It’s an untested assumption reached in the two decades since my father died.

I know with some confidence that he was an unhappy man for most of the time that I knew him. I sensed that it was only in the last few years of his life and after I had left home that he reached some measure of contentment. By that time I was only seeing my dad in snapshots when I visited at holidays, but he seemed settled in a way that I don’t remember him ever being while I lived with him. I remember trying to tell him that I thought he seemed happy, but I think that got lost when he received his cancer diagnosis shortly afterwards.

One of the great sadnesses of my life is that I never got to say goodbye to my father. As near as I can figure it, I was in an airplane somewhere over Lake Ontario when he died. I wanted to tell him that I loved him and to whatever extent I was, and am, able, that I appreciate a little more of where he might have been coming from.

People tell jokes as a way of making sense of their world, of controlling the uncontrollable. They are a reality check for know-it-alls and a momentary reboot for those who find themselves stuck in a rut. Comedy provides a kind of power over your environment, however fleeting, and one that improves with experience.

Just as experience tells you how long to hold the pause in the Old Woman story, it also tells you how to make sense of the other stories in your life. Waiting that one extra “Mississippi” can bring a lot of things into focus; too many and the joke isn’t funny anymore.

I love my dad: more now than at some points when he was alive. Every year brings more questions that I wish he was around to answer. I would like nothing more than to hear his raucous laugh and to see him wear his glasses upside down one more time. I think now we would have a lot more to talk about and to laugh about.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director