The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How To Say Something Funny About Anything pdfdrive com

Chapter Five (PRACTICAL): Double
Joke-webs & The Hadron Joke
Collider
The Large Hadron Collider will accelerate bunches of protons... colliding
them head-on..., with each collision spewing out thousands of particles at
nearly the speed of light.
Scientific American
The Hadron Joke Collider will bash two opposing subjects together,
colliding them head-on with the collision spewing out jokes at the speed of
thought.
Me
It’s Week Three of the class and I get them playing some improv games as a bit
of  a  warm  up
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.  They’ve  enjoyed  romping  round  the  room  but  it’s  time  for
something more cerebral. I sit them down and ask them if they’ve heard of the
Large  Hadron  Collider.  Most  of  them  have,  although  they’ve  no  idea  why  I’m
mentioning it.
‘We’re going to use a similar concept to write jokes,’ I tell them. Loads of jokes
are links between two previously unrelated subjects. I tell them a joke...
I love it that politicians are coming out as bisexual. On election night the
swingometer will at last be able to swing both ways!
‘That joke was written by doing two joke-webs, one on politicians and one on
sexuality,’ I say, showing them two joke-webs.

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‘The writer (okay, me) spotted the link between SWINGOMETER and SWINGS
BOTH WAYS. That link already existed between the two subjects. It was there
waiting for me to find it.’
I then get all mystical and explain my theory of Jokes in the Ether (see previous
chapter).
‘However, it’s not  always that straightforward.  Other links are  more subtle and
have  to  be  pushed.  That’s  where  the  Hadron  Joke  Collider  comes  in,’  I  say,
smiling, because I love this concept.
‘I’ll show you,’ I say. ‘First of all we need two subjects to bash together.’
The class choose ART and RELATIONSHIPS even though some of them don’t
know anything about art and others know even less about relationships!

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I get out my enormous flip chart (I always want plenty of room for their ideas)
and start the first joke-web. I ask for associations to do with RELATIONSHIPS.
The class comes up with the following.
Then I do the same with Art... I have highlighted the obvious links between the
subjects that came up immediately.
This  class  are  very  clever  and  full  of  ideas  so  this  stage  takes  us  about  20
minutes.  I  only  ask  them  for  one  layer  of  associations  but  sometimes  they  free
associate  down,  as  with  Renaissance,  so  I  write  it  down  (I  always  go  with  the
flow).
The class are sitting back in their seats, they think the work is done, but the most

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creative  stage  is  just  starting  -  the  one  where  we  collide  the  subjects  into  each
other. I tell them we are going to apply everything from the RELATIONSHIPS
joke-web to the central subject of ART and have a think about it, no matter how
ridiculous  the  initial  idea  seems,  and  then  do  the  same  with  Art  and
Relationships.
A  few  words  already  appear  on  ART  and  RELATIONSHIPS  such  as
naked/nudes, faking it /fake and reproduction. I know we might be able to turn
these into ideas, but we want more than that – don’t we?
We  start  with  ANDY  WARHOL  and  apply  him  and  his  ideas  to
RELATIONSHIPS.
We think in silence for quite a while before someone comes up with the idea of
having pop relationships instead of pop art. Then we re-apply his famous quote
about everyone being famous for 15 minutes to everyone being in a relationship
for 15 minutes, which naturally leads to the idea that for some people that would
be too long! A good start.
We carrying on working for the next 40 minutes, crashing ideas from one of the
joke-webs against the main subject of the other. Here are the ideas we came up
with. As usual, some are good, some are weak but they are all great work-out for
our joke writing muscles. We got another five jokes and a few more ideas that I
have explained in ‘Glimmers of gags’ below. Even if you only went on to sell or
use one of them I would say that was worth it.
‘I come from a very dysfunctional family, we had to have our family portrait
done by Salvador Dali.’
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(FAMILY applied to ART)
‘I went out with an art dealer once. It didn’t work out because he could tell
my orgasms were fake.’
(FAKING IT was on both joke-webs, the creativity was how to use it)
I had a friend who was an expressionist painter.
She was going great until she started having botox!
(Expressionist Paintings -- Facial Expressions -- Botox)
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I went to Tate & Lyle’s head office. They love sugar so much even their art
was cubist.
(Tate Gallery -- Tate & Lyle -- Sugar -- Cube -- Cubist)
My  boyfriend  was  worried  about  me  moving  in  so  I  explained  to  him  that
I’m an artist like Tracey Emin and I’m using his flat as a gallery to display
my installation. This one is called ‘dirty knickers on the floor’.

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(INSTALLATION applied to relationships)
‘I tried art classes but I can’t do a still life of any food because I’d eat it
before I’d finished the painting.
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(STILL LIFE applied to the student’s relationship with food)

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