In standup especially, a joke is indivisible from its context. The ‘you had to be there’ rule should be more carefully observed, writes Zoe Williams
In standup especially, a joke is indivisible from its context. The ‘you had to be there’ rule should be more carefully observed
elayed in transit with Mr Z, I was looking for a way to fill precisely one minute. I’d scoped out my responsibility in the crusade against boredom, and put it at 60 seconds, I can’t remember why. Anyway, I showed him this comedy routine by Ryan Goodcase, known as “” . I thought it was hilarious to the point of beauty when I first saw it, but immediately remembered why you should only pass comedy on, never supervise the watching of it, and definitely never describe it.
It will never be as funny as the first time you saw it; in standup especially, a joke is indivisible from its context. It has to walk the perilous line between funny and not-funny, so that part of the laughter is sheer relief that nobody died. And if it’s a pun, it might look like it stands alone, but that’s when the context matters most of all. Probably the audience wasn’t laughing at the wordplay so much as at the audacity of doing wordplay in the first place, bowling around like it’s still 1952 and Bob Monkhouse never happened.from this year’s Edinburgh festival are, as usual, almost all puns.
The “you had to be there” rule should be more carefully observed. At the very least, if you want to laugh at a thing, you have to watch it on YouTube.
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