The Punchline

 

The first pic is from a gematria loving Twixter account.  The second pic is an old joke from Steven Wright.  What do they have in common?

Misdirection.  That’s always a classic for a well written joke.  Not that these succeed with every member of the audience as humor can be highly subjective.

The idea of misdirection in humor is to link together two widely different thoughts that become clear when the punchline is delivered.  If you’re clever enough you can see the punchline coming.  But you’ve got to be quick, no chance to ask who is sitting next to you or Googling it before the comedian delivers the punchline.

Starting with the pyramids joke.  Pyramids is a purposeful choice despite other options being available.  You could do the joke with the Colossi of Memnon and the basic structure is the same.  But how many in the audience have actually heard of it?  They might not even know it’s Egyptian much less a popular tourist attractions in Egypt.  Pyramids is common, and instantly evokes images of old giant structures in a sandy desert area.  Now that you’ve misdirected the audience into thinking old time, you hit them with the thoroughly modern name of Eddie, trusting the audience to immediately figure out that there’s no actual chance that it would be the correct name.

Robots = computers with legs.  Operating by some sort of software that blandly runs with just 0’s and 1’s in a specific order.  The image of a loveless automaton evoked, then turned upside down with the response that the seemingly incoherent 0’s and 1’s are in fact a lovely poem.

If you have to explain the joke you’ve failed.  If there’s not an immediate reaction, the majority of the audience didn’t get it, you’ve lost them and the joke bombed.  Gematria operates in a world of bad misdirection humor.  The punchline isn’t supposed to be funny, but it is supposed to reach a conclusion that the audience understands.  And the tactics of making people feel smarter than they really are take hold.

A top priority is to explain the joke in advance often if not every single time.  Yeah, we’ve heard this a billion times before - A=1, B=2, C=3….  Get on with it already.  Sports is rigged.  Ok, we know that too.  Get on with it.  The misdirection has failed as you’re being force fed the background over and over.  Then you finally get to the meat.  The tie in to the inevitable two or three digit match to the bad news of the day.  Then the joke works, at least for a short time.  But it’s really the same joke over and over without a clever hook that will be remembered long term.  It’s like a word for word joke retelling but substituting “Tiger” for “Lion”.  Or Colossi of Memnon for Pyramids.

And then the material strays from the path of an effective misdirection joke.  When the comedian Gallagher performs you have a good idea he’s going to take a sledgehammer to a watermelon.  But he’s also going to smash some other stuff along the way.  Steven Wright always delivered his material in a flat monotone.  You know the jokes will all be done that way, you just don’t know what jokes are coming.  They’ve practiced their gimmick and honed it into a deadly comedic weapon.  The gematria newbie gets a sense they can become a master when they have zero chance of finding a new gimmick.  But they have been given tools to write their own jokes that only they think are funny.

At this point there are three main courses.  Give up entirely.  Continue to settle for the Attaboy!^TM from the leader. Or create your own world where being satisfied with laughing at your own jokes is good enough for attention.  Since their comedian of choice started off by messages of nonexistent evil empires and bigotry, take a guess what the jokes they make to amuse themselves are going to be like.  It’s a consistent pattern to stop using the preliminary explanation, put less and less gematria into it and then just talk about the biased views you really want to get off your chest.  And again, you really don’t need to pay a monthly fee to complain about shit.  If you’re continuing to throw in gematria with your complaints it’s just going to be free advertisement for the better comedian.  The one more practiced at their gimmick, and in gematria narratives the gimmick is misdirection at a level that attempts to force others to believe in your bad jokes when they fall flat over and over again.