by Jerry Corley – Founder, The Stand Up Comedy Clinic
Had a couple of private coaching sessions with 2 of my students today. They were very successful. One of my students is just beginning to apply the fundamental techniques of writing a joke. He was working on a technique using incongruity. Which impose the values of one thing onto another, completely different thing. The surprise comparison is what gets the laugh.
He posed an interesting question: “How do I find subjects to cross-pollinate to write jokes? The timing couldn’t have been more perfect because I was just thinking about this yesterday. I was on my way to the hospital to visit a friend. I thought about writing a quick joke or analogy joke (hospitals are like ___________). Well now that I have a subject (Hospitals) I have to find something to compare it to.
There are two ways to go about this:
1. Come up with anything to compare it to and start making lists and determine what phrases in that list that somehow relate to hospitals and develop a joke. OR 2. when you have your subject (Hospitals), quickly think of the things that stand out the most when you go into a hospital using all your senses!
The first things that came to me were the smell, the equipment, the sounds and the fact that nobody seems to speak English as their first language. That seemed funny to me so I chose the smell and the language. I thought what is different than a hospital and smells funny with people not speaking English as their first language. I thought of Vallarta Markets, which is a supermarket chain in Southern California that caters, primarily, to the Hispanic consumer.
So the analogy joke I came up with was: “Going to a Hospital is like shopping at Vallarta Markets, they smell funny and all the workers talk with an accent.”
It’s not a fall-on-the-floor joke, but it’s a simple joke that you could use as a cartoon caption or as part of a larger piece you’re doing on hospitals and it was easy to come up with. It took literally about 5 minutes.
