The Everything Kids' Joke Book

by Michael Dahl

  Relax. Stand up straight and don’t worry about what to do with your hands. Many comedians put their hands in the pockets of their pants or sport jacket.

  Don’t laugh at your own jokes. It’s your audience’s job to laugh. It’s your job to tell the joke with a straight face.

  After you tell your joke or funny story, give your audience time to laugh. Don’t rush or speak too fast. Once the laughter starts to get quiet or dies down, then begin your next joke.

  Practice telling jokes into a mirror. If you can feel comfortable in front of your own reflection, you’ll feel comfortable anywhere!

  Watch and listen to other comedians. You can learn a lot from observing the pros.

  Monologue: the routine of a standup comic

  Standup: comedians who stand up in front of their audiences and tell jokes

  Routine: a comedian’s collection of jokes that is done as an act over and over

  Beat: a pause or break in the dialogue for comic effect

  More Comedic Guidelines

  1. When telling a joke or funny story, make sure you think it’s funny.

  2. If you are giving a speech or monologue, tell your funniest joke first.

  3. Never begin with “Here’s a joke,” or “Now, this is funny …”

  4. Know when to quit. Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” That means “Keep it short!”

  Beats

  As musicians know, keeping the beat is crucial. Comedians also keep the beat. A beat is a pause or break in dialogue. One-liners are spoken without a beat. But putting in a beat and knowing where to put it and how long to make it are the marks of an experienced comedian. Take the following line and add a beat:

  I’m a terrible cook. All the gingerbread boys I make are nearsighted. So I’ve started using contact raisins.

  I’m a terrible cook. All the gingerbread boys I make are nearsighted. (beat) So I’ve started using contact raisins.

  Take just the right amount of time within the beat, and you end up with two jokes instead of one. Your audience will laugh after “nearsighted” and after “contact raisins.”

  FUNFACT

  Comedy expert Melvin Helitzer, who used to write for Sammy Davis, Jr., Shari Lewis, and Art Linkletter among others, advises would-be comedians that the average number of jokes in a comic monologue is 4 jokes per minute or 2 jokes plus 1 funny story.

  That means in a five-minute standup routine you should have a supply of 20 jokes, or 7 funny stories, or a combo of both.

  COMIC BIOGRAPHY

  Glued to Their Seats: A Lesson in Comic Timing

  Eleonora Duse (1859–1924), an Italian megastar famous for making the audience weep at her over-the-top dramatic roles, was just as good at wowing the audiences in a good comedy. Take this story: She once got into a heated tiff with a young actress who thought that she was just as good as The Duse (as she was sometimes called).

  “I can make the audience laugh at me,” said the younger actress. “Even if you’re onstage with me.”

  The Duse aimed to set the whippersnapper straight. “I can make the audience laugh and I can be offstage!”

  The two women struck a bet. In their next show together, The Duse played a scene where she set down a glass of wine before exiting on a comic line. The next scene was the young actress’s big moment in the show. Before her exit, however, The Duse set her glass down on a table, with half of the glass’s bottom hanging over the edge!

  During the young actress’s scene, the audience paid no attention to her. Their attention was glued to The Duse’s precarious wineglass, waiting for it to fall over at any moment. When the young actress realized what was going on, she became boiling mad. But she kept her cool. While she continued to play the scene, she strolled over to the wineglass and casually reached out to move it. But she couldn’t. The Duse had applied glue to the bottom of the glass before the play began. So, throughout the rest of the young actress’s scene she wrestled with the wineglass, trying to move it, sending the audience into fits of laughter—laughter set into motion by The Duse’s perfect comic timing.

  Tell the joke to individual friends or family members. You’ll soon feel how long the beat needs to be in order to make it work. Only by telling (and listening) to lots of jokes told in lots of ways can you learn the secrets of comic timing.

  Fresh A-peal: The Funniest Fruit

  Slipping on a banana peel—that’s the world’s oldest joke, right? Most people would agree. And years ago, when moving pictures started cranking up, silent comedians slipped on thousands of banana peels in thousands of picture reels.

  Leave it to Chaplin to make something old look new again. Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) was a film and comic genius of the early 20th century. Besides making and starring in his own classics, he was always generous with advice and ideas for new directors and writers.

  Once, a new screenwriter arrived in Hollywood and was having trouble with a scene involving the old banana peel gag. The writer asked Chaplin, “Charlie, what should I do? I’m at my wit’s end. A prim and proper lady slipping on a banana peel has been done a million times. How do I make it funny?

  “Should the camera show the banana first, then the lady walking? Or the lady walking, and then the peel? Or just the lady suddenly slipping? What do I do!”

  Chaplin had the answer: “Have your camera show the lady walking. Then show the peel.

  FUN FACT

  Simon Says: Give Me a “K” Sound!

  According to old-time funnyman Willie Clark in Neil Simon’s popular play The Sunshine Boys (made into a film starring comedy veterans George Burns and Walter Matthau), words are funny if they have a K sound in them. Neil Simon even makes a list of the funniest words. See if you agree:

  Chicken

  Pickle

  Cupcake

  Cookie

  Cucumber

  Car keys

  Cleveland

  Come to think of it, a lot of words relating to comedy have the K sound: comic, crazy, kooky, cut-up, kick, wacky, cartoon, heckle, joke, quip, clown, prank, wisecrack, kidding, caper, cracking up, tricky, tickle, slapstick, shtick, skit, funky, screwy, quirky, flaky, freaky, chuckle, snicker, and yuk!

  Then show the lady and the peel together. Then show the lady stepping over the peel.”

  “That’s it?” asked the writer.

  “Then,” said Chaplin, “show the lady falling into a manhole!”

  Besides slipping on their peels, comedians have made bananas the honorary pet fruit of funny business, the mascot of mayhem.

  Going bananas means someone is crazy.

  Banana oil is exaggerated talk or insincere flattery.

  A banana is a goofy person.

  Today throughout Great Britain, school kids call a weirdo a ‘nana

  Woody Allen wrote, directed, and starred in a hilarious hit called Bananas in 1971.

  In the early 19th century, comedians performed in music halls and burlesque joints. The star comedian of the show was called the top banana, and next the second banana, and so on. Experts aren’t exactly sure where the name comes from, but there are two theories. It might come from a famous sketch performed in burlesque halls that involved two clowns sharing a banana. Or it might refer to the stuffed, oversized (and sometimes water-filled!) bananas that early comics carried onstage to bonk each other over the head. These banana props were a version of the well-known slapstick.

  COMIC BIOGRAPHY

  As Thousands Laugh

  Neil Simon, by joke count alone, is the funniest man in America. He is the author of such comedy hits as The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Biloxi Blues, and Laughter on the 23rd Floor. He has written for television, films, and the stage and has won two Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize.

  Averaging 2 to 3 jokes per page for a comedy script, Simon has written over 10,000 jokes—and counting!

  That’s a lot of punch lines.

  Burlesque: A show of many skits with singing, dancing, and come
dy

  Slapstick

  Watching two people pretend to wrestle and brawl has always struck other people as a laugh riot. As Will Rogers once said, “Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.” In early Greek and Roman comedies by Plautus and Aristophanes, a surefire audience-pleaser was any scene where a slave got to beat up his master. To make the scene even funnier, and to ensure the paying audience members sitting in the back row got their full enjoyment (there were no microphones or closed-circuit TVs in those days), the players used slapsticks. These were long wooden bats made of two slats that “slapped” together whenever the bat struck an object, like a master’s noodle or his backside.

  FUN FACT

  Not Quite Himself

  Did you know that Charlie Chaplin once entered a “Charlie Chaplin Look-alike Contest” held in Monaco and won third place?

  Slapstick: 1. two wooden slats that are slapped together to make the sound of something striking something else; 2. silly, wild goofiness

  FUNFACT

  World’s Oldest Joke

  The world’s oldest written joke is written on a dried clay tablet over 3,000 years old! The tablet (along with more than 25,000 other tablets) was discovered by British archeologists in the 1850s as they unearthed the forgotten library of Ashurbanipal, king of ancient Assyria.

  The tablet tells the humorous story of a boy being reprimanded by his father for not attending school. And like all good stories, it begins with a joke that reads, roughly translated:

  Father: What are you doing?

  Son: Nothing.

  Father: Well, don’t do it around here.

  Although the clay tablets were collected for His Highness in the first millennium B.C., the stories that many of them tell are much older. Ashurbanipal’s language (Sumerian) was spoken long before 2500 B.C., so who knows how old the joke really is!

  Comedians continued to use the noisy props up through the early part of the 20th century. Nowadays, the term slapstick refers to silly, knockabout, wild-and-crazy goofiness.

  The Oldest Joke?

  No one knows exactly who said the world’s first joke or when, though it was probably a sight gag: Uglug the caveman ran into a mastodon or stepped in some dinosaur doo-doo while pursuing dinner, then watched his friends fall out of the trees with whoops of laughter. (The one friend who didn’t fall out of the tree was the world’s first critic.) By repeating his goof, practicing his timing, and packing up a portable supply of dino dung, Uglug might have performed his jokes for other villages and cave communities, thus creating the world’s first road show.

  Sight gag: a joke that you need to see (like someone slipping on a banana peel) and usually has no words

  Dilemma: a tough problem or sticky situation

  According to the Jewish and Christian traditions, the first comic was actually God! In the second chapter of the book of Genesis, God creates the first man out of the clay, or dust, of the earth. The first man is named Adam. The Hebrew word for dirt or ground is adamah. In other words, the first guy was known as Dusty.

  Don’t believe it? O-pun up Genesis and read it.

  FUN FACT

  Dumb Instinct

  When filming the hit comedy Dumb and Dumber, actor Jim Carrey changed the ending of the story. In the last scene, a busload of beautiful bikini models stop and ask for directions. The two dumb heroes, Harry and Lloyd, were supposed to board the bus, join the girls, and live happily ever after. But Carrey said that his character Lloyd was just too dumb to get on the bus. In fact, Carrey refused to act the scene as written; he would only let it be filmed with Lloyd and Harry walking away from the bus as it drives off.

  Carrey proved to be right. The scene is much funnier! Lloyd (and Harry) are too stupid to realize they can join the pretty girls. The final scene of Dumb and Dumber is now a comedy classic. Carrey’s lesson to all aspiring comedians? Trust your instincts!

  De-Laughs in Dilemma

  A dilemma is a tough problem or a sticky situation. Physical funny man Bill Irwin, featured on the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” video, once said that “The heart of clowning is how to get yourself into a dilemma.” Once in a problem, an audience loves watching how a clown or comedian will get themselves out—whether it’s Laurel and Hardy pushing a heavy piano up a long flight of stairs or Pee-Wee Herman doing his Big Shoe Dance to calm an angry motorcycle gang.

  Rosie’s Rule: “Mix It Up”

  Rosie O’Donnell once gave a clue to comedy on the air. She explained to her television show audience how she teaches her son Parker the funny business: “Take two things that you normally don’t see together, and put them together.” Little kids begin with silly starters like, “Did you ever see a duck dancing? Did you ever see a pig drive a truck?” But Rosie’s Rule applies to big kids, too. That’s how comedians get ideas for gags and jokes. Notice all the successful comedies that follow the same rule:

  Mix an overweight, nerdy professor and a sexy, handsome guy and you get:

  The Nutty Professor

  A loud, bossy Las Vegas lounge singer and a convent of quiet nuns:

  Sister Act

  A super-muscly, macho tough-guy and a classroom of 5-year olds:

  Kindergarten Cop

  A lawyer who always has to tell the truth:

  Liar, Liar

  Can’t Do It!

  The answer to each of these riddles is a compound word. Circle each answer as you find it in the letter grid, then write the word on the line next to each riddle. You get one hint!

  A Clue to Be Clueless

  The late Steve Allen—comic, author, and television personality—said that most humor is based on confusion. “Some of the best jokes are the result of two people not understanding each other.” For example, this gag:

  Grandpa: My brand new hearing aid is the most expensive you can buy. It cost me over four thousand dollars.

  Alex: What kind is it?

  Grandpa: A quarter to four.

  FUN FACT

  Double Definitions

  Sometimes the same word means different things to different people. In an interview, Tom Stoppard, the writer of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, was asked what his next play was about.

  “It’s about to make a lot of money,” Stoppard replied.

  Another example of comic confusion occurs when people don’t tell you everything at once:

  Liz: Was I ever a dummy! I threw the baby’s blanket out the window.

  Shirley: I hope the baby doesn’t catch pneumonia.

  Liz: Oh, don’t worry. The baby was still in the blanket.

  Allen advises young comics to practice their joke-writing skills by seeing how many funny lines they can think up that would come after this sentence:

  “Do you know where I can get a sandwich?”

  How You Say…

  Listen to Robin Williams in any of his films, or even in a TV interview. He uses a different voice or accent every other sentence. And when he’s not talking, he’s buzzing, hissing, booming, or creaking. We’re not laughing at his words. We’re laughing at his vocal expression. In other words, what can make a joke funny is not what you say, but how you say it.

  When you tell a joke next time, use a different voice for each line. If there are different people (or animals) in your joke, give them each a unique way of speaking.

  Need inspiration? Listen to Martin Short as the weird Franck Eggelhoffer in Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride. Listen to Bronson Pinchot as he steals the scene in Beverly Hills Cop with his crazy accent. Then there’s always the growling, shrieking Bobcat Goldthwait in the Police Academy movies, or his partner Michael Winslow who can make any sound in the known universe using just his mouth. There’s the squawking Gilbert Godfrey and the demented Judy Tenuta, and the tight-lipped French Stewart on Third Rock from the Sun and grown-up Adam Sandler whining like a goofy little twerp.

  Actors who are talented at creating different voices sometimes end up in animated films or
TV cartoons. Next time you have a cartoon on the tube, check out the names listed under the heading “Voices.” You may be surprised.

  FUN FACT

  Comic Relief

  The first Comic Relief, a benefit to raise awareness and money for America’s homeless, was televised on March 29, 1986. It was the first benefit featuring only comedians and was hosted by that great comic triple threat: Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams, and Billy Crystal. In the show’s four and one-half hours jokesters from A to Z (Louis Anderson to Bob Zmuda) raised $2,500,000. That averages out to more than $9,000 per minute!

  Straight man/Straight woman: the member of a comedy team who sets up the jokes and lets the gag player deliver the punch line

  Going Straight for the Laughs

  One of the most valuable players in a comedy team or a funny movie or television sitcom is the straight man or straight woman. The straight player seldom gets to say the big jokes or do the goofy stunts. The straight player sets up the jokes and lets the gag player deliver the punch line. The straight player stands calmly by and watches the other comic get wild and crazy. For instance, in a silly exchange like the following: