today: 1.10.00
every day

(Disclaimer)
I am very flattered when people find the words I write to be entertaining or funny. And I'm triple-flattered when they take the trouble to let me know. But many people ask me nice things like, "How did you get funny? I'm not funny at all. In fact, every time I make a joke, someone kicks me in the stomach or punches me in the throat. How do you do it?! Tell me!!! Help me avoid another brutal beating." And my typical response to the question, "how did you get funny?" is "I don't know. I think I'm just following the rules." And then I throat-punch them.

All funny things follow rules. And there are some very easy rules you can remember and follow to train yourself to be funnier, or at least recognize patterns in other people's funny stuff. And, to that end, I've decided to commit some of these rules to you. I will occasionally reveal some tips for unlocking the Funny within you, through this (probably sporadic) series of entries called "Secrets of High Class Comedy". In the entries, I will not only teach you how to make a joke, but I will hopefully train you to make a slightly less shitty joke. I will likely be hunted and killed by hack comics and hack comic writers everywhere, but I've decided that the middlebrow deserves to be a little more accessible to all of us. This is my contribution.

*****

Secrets of High Class Comedy, Vol. 1:
Choosing the Right Cultural Reference

If there's one thing everyone loves on planet Ha, it's a pointed cultural reference. Cultural references are funny because they not only remind us how sharp the Funnymaker is, they also (and more importantly) serve to remind us, the recipient of the Funny, exactly how smart we are. Everyone wins with a cultural reference, but the wrong cultural reference can hamstring an otherwise perfect moment of Funny and turn you from Johnny Chuckles to Jacky Hackenstein. Don't worry about that, though: with this quick tutorial you'll soon be knocking out so many successful cultural references, audiences will start to yell "Ali Boom-Ba-Yay!" every single time you open your mouth.

For purposes of brevity and directness, I'll just focus on a simple set up and pay off that follows the standard rules for flipping cultural references as a way of making with the Funny. We'll call this scenario, "Oscar Picks!":

The Set-Up:
You are discussing the current Academy Award nominees for "Best Picture" and expressing some disappointment at the choices. In fact, you can think of some films that have been overlooked...and that's where the laughs start!

How it works:
It's a combination of surprise, recognition and irony. You see, rather than proposing a suitable movie title, you propose a movie that is universally accepted as being very terrible. People recognize the title (hopefully! but I'll address that later on), remember how awful it is, and might even be a little embarrassed that they've actually seen it. The more suprisingly bad the movie title, the stronger the title wave of laughter.

When this can be used:
On stage or on paper, this is an easy set-up for a bit (e.g. "have you seen the nominees for best picture? i can't believe what's been nominated? How many more times is the Academy going to overlook [insert movie title here]?"

This set-up also works very well in a video store, as you or your friends are trying to hunt down that perfect movie for the evening. In this case, you have two easy approaches at your disposal. First, if you have a good memory and use my list (below) as a reference guide for your comedy material, you can simply run over to your friends, who will both be busy trying to find a movie, and say, "hey, what about [insert movie title]?"

Or, if you are a novice and you're just getting your comedy chops together, you can run around the video store and find an appropriate video title, grab the box, and run over to show it to your friends. This is really easy because it doesn't require sharpening your memory enough to retain the names of all the terrible movies you've seen. The super-beginner might also want to deliver this joke without a word - just show the box to your friends. For a bigger laugh, I would suggest saying, "Now why didn't this ever win an Oscar?" and then lay it on them. Even if the setup is cheap, the payoff, if carefully considered, is worth it.

The High Class Difference
Rattling off the name of a terrible film is something pretty much anyone can do. But the High Class Difference is a formula I would call:

NEAR DISTANCE + ABSURDITY = HIGH CLASS COMEDY

What will separate you from the Jacky Hackensteins of the world are your ability to hit just the right cultural reference, one that adheres to the ND+A=HCC formula. This applies to all cultural references. It can't be too recent, or it runs the risk of being a temporary Bobbitt (see "Dodging the Bobbitt" below for more details)

Also, shorter is almost always better, particularly when spoken instead of written. Shorter names or titles punch harder and lessen your chance of messing up the name and ruining an otherwise sweet morsel of Funny.

OK, so what? It's one thing to provide a formula, but how can you be expected to do all the research you might expect from a high class comedy professionals if you're just a weekend warrior? No problem: here's a handy reference guide with a dozen movie titles that will work wonderfully with "Oscar Picks!" every single time: (print it, commit to memory, or simply use it as a guideline for your own delicious cultural references)

***Movie Title Reference Guide***
Captain Ron
Hamburger: The Movie
C.H.U.D. (or, if written, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud works quite nicely, but is not recommended for spoken delivery)
Breakin' Two - Electric Boogaloo (this is a cornerstone of High Class Comedy)
Nothing But Trouble
Stroker Ace (Burt Reynolds' filmography has provided a lot of really good HCC material, actually. Sharkey's Machine and Gator are also really good titles.)
Newsies! (Funny, but I think this title is starting to lose its freshness, personally)
Willow
Beastmaster
Dr. Giggles
TRON (While this is a film that may be re-evaluated and regarded more highly in the future, it is nonetheless funny and terrible-sounding to today's audiences.)
Porky's Revenge ("Porky's" is a rare case. While it is funny by itself to most audiences, Porky's Revenge can be unleashed on a more refined audience and will have much better results than plain old Porky's. I can't teach you everything at once!)

The biggest pitfall to High Class Comedy you could encounter during "Oscars Picks!" is getting too obscure for a particular audience. Anything that requires being part of your immediate circle of friends or being an expert in a particular field - such as cinema - will cause Oscar Picks! to fail miserably. On the contrary, if the audience actually does consist of only your closest peers, you much more license to be obscure because chances are good that you've all seen many movies together. For instance, a couple of my favorite movie title cultural references are KRULL and C.H.O.M.P.S., but I have learned that many people are not familiar with either one of these movies and the titles themselves don't sound particularly funny on their own. (And, in all honesty, High Class Comedy is not for inside jokes between friends. Let your friends eat cake.) With the reference guide provided above, even the least accessible titles at least sound kind of funny anyway.

Dodging the Bobbitt
This is something I will refer to often, when differentiating High Class Comedy from hack comedy. Dodging the Bobbitt simply means avoiding any joke that is so easy to make it loses all resonance - specifically, one that has been made a million times already with varying degrees of success. (As was the case with the infamously overdone comedy exposure of John Wayne Bobbitt's castration.) Examples of Bobbitts in cultural references:

*movies*
Ishtar
Hudson Hawk
Police Academy (And Steve Gutenberg in general, actually.)

*music*
Backstreet Boys
Puff Daddy
Ricky Martin
Britney Spears
Alanis Morisette
Hanson
Elvis (in fact, if you are still making jokes about Elvis, you need to be slapped immediately - for shame! That's lazy comedy. Even Jacky Hackenstein has better instincts than that.)

*pop culture misc.*
Bill Gates
Clinton/Lewinsky (obviously)
Viagra
Ron Popeel
Jerry Springer
COPS
The Taco Bell Dog
Carrot Top (and Gallagher - however, in smaller circles, "Gallagher 2" has some credibility left)

And remember: Oscar Picks! is just lesson one. It can be rearranged for music, television, whatever. Do your homework, work variations, and you'll be on your way to doing comedy the High Class way.