How to Write a Joke

Comedy writer Elliott Kalan (The Daily Show, The Flop House, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and co-host of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker) spills the secrets of how he grows jokes from tiny ideas into full-blown laughs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:44Roman Mars?

  that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com/podcast. That's Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers.

• 1:26Roman Mars?

  That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel. That flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you listened to our show last year, you may have heard the voice of Elliot Kalin, who was my co-host for a series we did on the book, The Power Broker. And as far as I'm concerned, Elliot was the perfect co-host. He's smart, knowledgeable, easy to talk to, and he's also very, very funny. Because when he's not moonlighting at 99PI, Elliot is a professional.

• 2:10Roman Mars?

  And over the years, he has written comedy in just about every medium there is. He worked for over a decade at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he eventually became the show's head writer. He did stand-up, he writes comic books, and currently he is the co-host of the original bad movie podcast, The Flophouse, and the showrunner for the forthcoming Netflix Ghostbusters animated series. We wanted to have Elliot back on the show because he has now written a book of his own, not so much about his career, but about his craft. He says, "When you write jokes for a living, it takes a lot more than just having a good sense of humor. Instead, you have to have a system." The book is called Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, and he's here to talk about it with us.

• 2:54Roman Mars?

  Elliot Kalin, it is so nice to have you back.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Thank you, Roman. It's great to be back. Thank you so much for having me on to promote a book that I may make some money off of, after we did so much to put some money in Robert Caro's pockets. I appreciate my getting a shot at it.

• 3:05Roman Mars?

  That's right, that's right. So, so let's get, you know, down to the basics, the very, very beginning. You know, what on earth made you think that you could write jokes for a living?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  The great thing about writing jokes for a living is that, less that you need someone to tell you you can do it, and more that no one can tell you not to do it. And it helped that I grew up also watching television in the early 1990s, when there was still a lot of stand-up comedy on television in particular.

• 3:32Roman Mars?

  Like, you and I, I'm a little older than you, but there was this phase of like cable television where all of a sudden you saw somebody standing in front of a brick wall, you know, like as part of television, you know?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  And now we live in a world where it feels like there's more comedy than not comedy. So now it seems quaint, but it felt like there was so much comedy around that this was something you could do. And so I very foolishly somehow managed to achieve the lucky breaks to succeed at doing it, which baffles me and my family to this very day.

• 4:02Roman Mars?

  But what I'm curious about is like, you got into this because the adults in your life told you you are a naturally funny person, you're a person that just makes people laugh. But that is not enough if you need to produce The Daily Show. You can't just be naturally funny. It is a job, and you cultivated this thing called joke farming as a way to produce all the jokes that you have to do for something like The Daily Show. Can you talk about joke farming and, and how you sort of developed it as a discipline?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I feel like the difference between being a funny person and being a comedy professional is the ability to be funny, not just spontaneously, not just for whoever you're talking to, but to be funny on demand in a professional manner when it needs to be done. You can't wait for inspiration to strike. It has to be a reliable thing that you can go to when you need it and you can command it to a certain extent, rather than letting it command you. And so when I was working at The Daily Show, I worked with a lot of writers, and I was like this too, where at first it was writing by gut. You're writing the thing that you think is funny in the moment and you spend a lot of time staring into space when something isn't coming to you. But when you're in an office and they're like, you know, it's nine o'clock and your script is due at 10:30, you can't do that. And so I knew I had to write a lot of jokes really fast.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And I should define, a joke is anything that is created in order to make someone laugh. That to me is a joke.

• 5:22Roman Mars?

  Got it.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And if I'm not feeling funny that day, it doesn't matter. Like, the show still needs it. And the show needs a lot of jokes and it needs me to write them in, if I'm lucky, two hours, you know, often less than that. And so I started talking to myself about what is the unconscious process that my mind goes through when I am coming up with a joke off the top of my head? I need to verbalize it. I need to be able to articulate to myself so that I can then replicate it as a real deliberate process that I can force myself to go through.

• 5:50Roman Mars?

  And did you go through this exercise of figuring this out, verbalizing it at the time? Or is this something that you did writing the book? Or is this, you know, like, did you?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Oh, no, this is something I did at the time. This is, I was, I said to myself, I need to free myself from being chained to inspiration, basically, which is something I can't control. And so I want to have a process where you can take any subject and you can go through the steps of that process and then come out with a joke on the other end. And one of the things that I want to get across in the book is that you don't have to use my process, but it's good to have a process. And your process should mimic your way of thinking. It should fit your needs, your voice, how you most comfortably write. But whatever that process is, it should be something that you know the steps of so that at those times when you don't have inspiration, but you need to produce a joke, you can do it.

• 6:42Roman Mars?

  Okay, so let's talk about some of that processing and how The Daily Show process morphed into your own process that you described.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I mean, for copyright and patent purposes, this is my own original process, you know? I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's influences, but. The, uh, let's, let's not give them too much credit. No, I feel, the thing I should say also about the, the, working the Daily Show, I, I don't want it to sound like I've been like, I'm a genius who came up with all this stuff. You know, this was very much me being, being taught and led by, by the people I was very lucky to, to be working with.

• 7:12Roman Mars?

  So your day at the Daily Show starts, there's lots of news, some of it is hard news to figure out how to make comedy about, some of it maybe is super easy to make comedy about.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Some of it's very easy. There was one time, there was a, there was a stadium that got built somewhere where, and from above it looked like a vagina, and it was a very easy one to write jokes about. Yeah.

• 7:29Roman Mars?

  And so, could you take us through the joke farming process with a joke from the Daily Show?

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Sure. So the first thing I would have to do is consider, who is telling this joke? Who is the joke teller whose voice is it? Which in the case of the Daily Show, and I was there, would have been Jon Stewart. He's the host of the show, he's gonna say all the jokes. Then, I would try to say to myself, what is the point of this joke? And by point, I mean, what is the message I'm trying to get across in this joke? What's the meaning of it? Not necessarily the funny thing about it, in fact, often it's the least funny part of the joke.

• 7:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And so, an example that, I was always very proud of myself, too much, so much people would say, is a joke that I wrote for the Daily Show in 2015. There'd been a terrorist attack in France, and the United States sent the then Secretary of State, John Kerry, on a goodwill visit.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Secretary of State John Kerry is on a charm offensive this morning in Paris.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And the thing about John Kerry is, at the time, he was famous for being very boring and stiff. Just a slow talking, like a statue of a man. He's more statue than man.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  I would like to say directly to the people of Paris and of all of France, that each and every American stands with you today, both to the cause of confronting extremism, and in the cause which the extremists fear so much.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And the first point that jumps into your head is, this is the guy you're sending on a goodwill visit. This guy who is very boring and very unpersonable. Uh, but, that seemed very obvious. There had to be something less obvious than, John Kerry is boring, which at this point at the Daily Show, I think we had told roughly 700,000 million jokes about John Kerry being right. So in looking through the material that we had been given by the researchers and segment producers for this piece, I found this Wolf Blitzer clip where he's reminding us that John Kerry is this enormous Francophile. He loves France.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  John Kerry speaks French, loves France, studied in France.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  So the point I decided to go with for this joke is, the world's stiffest, least kind of cool man loves everything about the world's sexiest country.

• 9:32Roman Mars?

  Right, right.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  But that's a point. It's not a, if I say it like that, it's not funny.

• 9:36Roman Mars?

  That's not a joke. That's just-

• 9:37Speaker 01

  No, it's not a joke. It's just me stating a true fact.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And so I have to develop a premise to go around it. And a premise is essentially, what is the little story that you're gonna tell this joke through that gets close to the point, but not so close that you're just saying it, so that the audience can make a little leap in their minds and they can get it.

• 9:58Roman Mars?

  Like you're setting up a scenario so they will arrive to the point without you telling them the point of the joke.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And one way I like to think about premises is kind of like, what-if scenarios. And so I said to myself, what if John Kerry loves French things so much, that as long as the word "French" is in there, he loves it.

• 10:14Roman Mars?

  Got it.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  French fries, French kissing, French horns. And it bakes in the second point that is unrelated to the story that I was covering, but it's kind of a funny point still to me, which is, there's all this stuff that's not French, but we call it French.

• 10:28Roman Mars?

  We call it French, right.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Which is really fun.

• 10:30Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  So I've got the premise. John Kerry loves everything with French in the name. Now I need structure. And structure is literally the mechanical construction of the joke. How you release each piece of information, one step after another in order. So you walk the audience right up to the very edge of the point, where they can then make the leap on their own, and they land in the joke.

• 10:51Roman Mars?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So in writing this John Kerry joke, I started riffing on Wolf Blitzer's cadence.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  John Kerry speaks French, loves France, studied in France.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I wanted to continue that cadence in a kind of a list, but where John makes it a question-answer thing. Instead of saying, "He loves French fries. He loves French Bulldogs." Instead, it's, "Favorite type of fries?"

• 11:13Speaker 04

  Favorite type of fries?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  And the audience fills in French. And he says-

• 11:16Speaker 04

  French!

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Favorite type of bulldog?

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Audience fills in French.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  French!

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And when you're structuring a joke, you want to do what's called heightening. You want to escalate it from the kind of least funny one, the least exaggerated one, to the most exaggerated one. And then you move on to more dramatic examples or sillier examples. Favorite kind of meat, French. And so I've now established the pattern. French, French, French. It could go on forever. There's so many French things. But then at the end, I want to subvert that pattern. I want to disrupt it.

• 11:49Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  And so I was like, what if there's something where the answer could be French, but then it isn't French?

• 11:55Roman Mars?

  Got it. Okay, okay.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  And so there's a kind of mustard called French as mustard. And John Kerry, at the time famously, was married to one of the heirs of the Heinz condiment fortune. So I could say. Favorite mustard? And the audience expects the answer to be French. And then John's gonna say.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  Heinz.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Come on, he's not gonna jeopardize his marriage over mustard. And so you've taken a joke that's specifically about John Kerry. You've made it about, there are a lot of things called French. And then you've taken it back around to being a joke that only works for John Kerry, because only John Kerry is married to a Heinz.

• 12:28Roman Mars?

  Okay, yes.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  And I think the process of working on that took probably less time than it took to describe it, you know? Because I was like, here are the steps that I'm going through. And I could design this joke so much faster than I would have otherwise if I was just sitting here trying to think of something to come out of the blue, you know?

• 12:44Roman Mars?

  So, but outside of The Daily Show, I know your book has a lot of examples from, you know, from the world of comedy at large. What are other good examples of somebody using structure to subvert expectation?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  So, most people are familiar, I think, with the kind of structure that you would call setup punchline. And in the, one of the examples I use in the book is a joke by Rita Rudner, who I think is one of the greatest stand-ups of all time.

• 13:04Roman Mars?

  Totally. I grew up with her. She was one of the standouts of the eighties.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  She's amazing, yeah. And one of her first jokes, she says.

• 13:11Speaker 06

  It's gonna be a long time for me for children. I'm very single. I was going with someone for a few years, but we broke up. It's one of, oh, it's one of those things. He wanted to get married and I didn't want him to.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  But that structure of here's a piece of information. And now I'm going to subvert it slightly with the punchline. And I'm not going to say I broke with my boyfriend. He wanted to get married, but he married his other girlfriend. Like, that's, that's not a funny way to say it. But you're surprising the audience by providing an answer that is ideally logical, but not in the way that the audience originally thought it was going to be.

• 13:49Roman Mars?

  I, I think it's an amazing joke because the sentence that, that subverts expectations, I didn't want him to. All the meaning of the joke relies on the word him.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yes. And I would say it is a brilliant joke to me because so much of it is packed in that word. And the fewer number of words that you can use to deliver a joke, the fewer number of details you can provide, usually the better. You don't want to confuse the audience and with the clearest, most precise word that you can use. And so there might be that moment where the audience takes a short second to understand it and to complete it for themselves. But that's the, that's the moment where the joke lives, that beautiful moment there.

• 14:29Roman Mars?

  In the book, you say that in your joke writing process, there's other elements to a joke that you like to consider beyond the point, the premise and the structure. So after you've figured out what that core logic, what comes next?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  So then we get into this, into what I would call the fiddling with the joke, where you work on the tone of it, kind of like what emotional implications you're trying to get into it. Are you speaking with sincerity or insincerity? What level of irony are you bringing to this? What level of aggression towards the audience or towards the subject of the joke are you bringing? And it's kind of like when you're speaking at a wedding where you're trying to balance the sincerity of your feelings towards the couple that are getting married with the insincerity of the kind of ribbing that you're doing of them.

• 15:09Roman Mars?

  So give, give me an example of tone and tone management when you're doing a joke.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  So Don Rickles, for instance, who Don Rickles, for the, for the younger members of the listenership, if they don't know, Don Rickles was the master of insult comedy that was just so aggressively over the top hostile that you could not take it seriously as real, actual hostility.

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Am I right? His, his wife and your wife have the same, same name, Frank's wife and your wife? What, are you a detective?

• 15:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm a detective. That's right. I mean, you come up with these remarks. They have the same name, don't they?

• 15:47Speaker 07

  Now, Denzel was...

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Whereas sometimes, the more deadpan you are, like with a comedian like Steven Wright, who's, who I think is a master, but his stuff is so deadpan that you're like, well, obviously, he didn't really do these things.

• 16:06Speaker 08

  Called the wrong number today. I said, hello, is Joey there? And a woman answered. She said, yes, he is. I said, can I speak to him, please? She said, no, he can't talk right now. He's only two months old.

• 16:20Speaker 08

  I said, all right, I'll wait.

• 16:23Roman Mars?

  I mean, who is telling the joke is, it's maybe not as important as the joke itself, but it's like up there.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  It's, who is telling the joke is the first piece of information that the audience gets about the joke. Who is this person? What do I assume their perspective that they're bringing to it is? And in the book, I talk about kind of like stand-up persona and how it can help become the context for the tone of a joke. And an example of this that I use in the book is Charlie Hill, who is another great comic, who is a member of the Oneida Nation.

• 16:53Speaker 09

  Know a lot of you white people never seen an Indian do stand-up comedy before, you know? Like, for so long, you probably thought that Indians never had a sense of humor, you know? We never thought you were too funny either.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  He was on a talk show in the 70s, and they asked him if he ever played Cowboy and Indians, which is, I wish I hope was a setup that he provided for them and not a, not an actual question that they were asking him. And he said, no, we never played Cowboys and Indians, but we did play Nazis and Jews. The rules are the same. And that's a harsh, I love that joke. That's a hard joke. But they, but it's a, coming from someone who is bringing the perspective of a Native American and indigenous person. It means a certain thing.

• 17:32Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  It is not a joke that means to make a joke about the ideas of Nazis killing Jews. It is instead about reframing this, this childhood game that makes light of genocide in the light of another genocide that the audience recognizes.

• 17:45Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  But in a funny way, as, as a funny joke.

• 17:47Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  And the fact that it's coming from Charlie Hill means we understand what he's getting at.

• 17:52Roman Mars?

  And this, this leads us to the audience, which is like the completion of the joke, which is essentially like the, the last part and the most important part of.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It's the most important, unfortunately, it's the most important part. And like, nobody, you can't tell a joke on your own. Like the, the audience provides the most important part of the joke, which is the person laughing at the joke. And there's something very depressingly humbling about the idea that like, you don't get to decide ultimately if your work is funny or not. Like the audience gets to decide. And if they're not laughing, then you, you failed them. But they also, the audience wants to laugh.

• 18:25Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And that was such a big thing for me when I was performing stand-up was remembering the audience is not there to get mad at me. They're, they're not challenging me. They might be a little bit, but they want the joke writer or the performer to succeed because it's more fun for them.

• 18:39Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And you want to succeed by maybe challenging what they're going to laugh at a little bit, but not challenging it so much that you're deliberately bombing. There's some comedians who love to bomb. It's very fun if you're a comedian to watch another comedian bomb, but only because then you become the audience. The audience becomes the punchline to the joke and you become the audience of watching the joke of an audience not getting a joke. And that's why when I was young, I kind of was very frustrated with Andy Kaufman's comedy because it was like, Andy Kaufman is both the joke teller and the audience. Like he, it is all about his reaction or his enjoyment of the audience's confusion.

• 19:13Speaker 10

  I don't understand one thing.

• 19:17Speaker 10

  No, seriously. Why everyone is going boo on like the joke, when I told some of the jokes. And then when I don't want you to laugh, you're laughing.

• 19:31Speaker 10

  Like right now, I don't understand.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Now I kinda like it. Now I think it's kinda funny because it makes the audience such an integral part of that material.

• 19:40Speaker 10

  I had other stuff I was gonna do for you, but I don't think I should. So I just wanna say thank you and, you know, I'm, I'm just trying to do, don't have, you don't have to say that, really, okay? I'm just trying to do my best to have some fun and if you don't like it, that's it. Okay, thank you very much and good night.

• 19:57Roman Mars?

  I mean, one of the reasons why Andy Kaufman ends up working is you could see the sort of anti-comedy stuff where it seems like it's just for his own benefit, but in a totally another act, you could see just how funny he is and bringing the people in when he wants to.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  The first audience for all of Andy Kaufman's bits, they are the first wave at D-Day that get mowed down and never have a chance because, so that the next wave of audience members can understand it and laugh at the joke, you know?

• 20:27Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  But even then, it's a matter of delivering information to the audience. And the audience will give you thoughts that are sometimes wrong. If the audience says, "I didn't like that you talked about this thing," then that's not a good note. But if the note is, "I didn't think that was funny the way you talked about it," then that's a good note because then you're not communicating the absurdity you're seeing properly to the audience.

• 20:51Roman Mars?

  Could you give an example of audience feedback that was valuable to you?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Some of the most audience feedback I got was when I was working on the Netflix seasons of Mystery Science Theater 2000. And Mystery Science Theater was the show I wanted to work on since I was a teenager. I felt really like so grateful that I got to work on it. And when we were working on that first season, I was like, this is my philosophy. Max jokes. That's what I used to call it in the radio room. Maximum jokes. Let's see how many jokes we could fit in there. And we put in just wall-to-wall jokes.

• 21:23Speaker 11

  It's like how The Wire taught me how crime works. Now I'm good at crime. I can't identify you by your chest hair. Oh! I was the one shooting you! Oh! Ah, now the gun's on the other foot. You just got narcosed.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And the feedback we got from the audience was, hey, there's too many jokes in this show. They're like, I can't, because I don't have time to process each joke before the next one comes. I don't have time to really sit in that joke and laugh at it, and then I'm missing the next one. And that was a good note, because there's something important about the time after a joke and the time before the next joke, and the timing of that. And so for the second season of that show, if it felt like there were too many jokes too close together, I'd weed them out. And Joel Hodgson, the creator of that show, he started calling me the joke killer. I'd be like, we should, we should take these out. And he's like, oh, the joke killer is at it again. But it was a matter of kind of thinning the herd so that the strongest jokes have their chance to get their best moment in the sun.

• 22:18Roman Mars?

  When we come back, we talk to Elliot about what his fellow comedy writers think of his system and how comedians can use comedy for good and evil. Stay with us.

• 22:40Roman Mars?

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• 23:39Roman Mars?

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• 24:24Roman Mars?

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• 24:43Speaker 12

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• 25:46Roman Mars?

  We are back with my sometimes co-host and always brilliant comedy writer Elliot Kalin. So Elliot, earlier, you kind of laid out the elements of what you call joke farming, and there's a few of them. There's the identity, the idea, the premise, the structure, the tone, the voice, the wording, the audience. Like, this is a process. It is developed. So I'm curious, were your fellow writers on The Daily Show aware that you were going through all these steps in your head? Like, were they aware that you were joke farming?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Um, no, not really. I mean, by that time, I was the head writer on the show, and some of the writers I would talk to about, like, let's try to think systematically about about the way we're doing things, so you can increase your hit rate. But often, they were not that interested in it. I mean, more because when you're a comedy writer, I think it is hard sometimes to think of what you're doing as engineering in that way, as something that you can do that way. And you kind of don't want to think about it that way sometimes, because I think there's a fear that if you question where the inspiration is coming from, if you try to control it, that you might lose it, that you might go, it might go away. You know, it's a miracle that you don't control. And I feel like every comedy person has this fear in the back of their head that someday, that one day, they'll wake up and they won't

• 27:01Speaker 01

  know how to be funny anymore. And there's an old saying from, I think, E.B. White, about explaining how a joke works. It's like dissecting a frog, like, it's not good for the frog, you know. I don't agree with that. But I think a lot of people have internalized that idea. But also, at the same time, there are a number of comedy professionals I met, who are, they're not so interested in figuring out their own process, but they are very fascinated by how other people do their process. And the thing you always hear about Jerry Seinfeld, or you used to hear about Jerry Seinfeld, was, "He actually sits down and writes," like, "he sits down every day for a couple hours and just writes and works. He doesn't carry around a notebook and just wait for something to hit him, and then work it out on stage." Like, he writes it out. And so I think there is an interest on the part of professionals in other people's way of doing that craft.

• 27:46Roman Mars?

  It's funny to me that when people reveal that Jerry Seinfeld actually writes, that Joan Rivers has a card catalog full of, you know, 10,000 jokes, or something like that, that it's surprising to people, because they just think of them as funny people, when, when the best at this definitely know their craft. And even if they don't write it out in steps like you do in terms of joke farming, they're basically joke farming.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yes, or at the very least joke foraging.

• 28:15Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Where they are, you know, they're, they're keeping their eye open to the world around them for opportunities for things to, to tell jokes about. I think there's an attempt to work very hard at something and then make it look as if no work has been put into it.

• 28:28Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And that's the real magic of it. The illusion that someone is up on stage and they're just riffing, they're just speaking their truth or whatever, and it's just coming out so funny. But I think that illusion is part of the craft of it. And I know that when I read prose or when I watch standups, even I as an audience member, I'm like, ugh, God, I wish I was as good as them because they're just talking and it's, and it's funny. Like, they must have put no work into that at all. And then I have to remember like, no, they did, they obviously put work into it.

• 28:55Roman Mars?

  Well, I want to talk about one thing you mentioned in the book, which is this ability to use these techniques of joke telling for evil purposes.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  I wouldn't advise it. I don't recommend people use it for evil.

• 29:09Roman Mars?

  Yeah, but how, how, how are they used for evil purposes?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, joke writing, joke telling, it's just a, it's a tool. And so I think there are bad people who use comedy to get bad effects. And I think the misunderstanding is if it's funny, it must be right. It must be getting at something that I believe, which I think is not true. And comedians, for a long time, they liked to puff themselves off about like, well, real, really comedy is about speaking truth to power and you always punch up, you never punch down. It's not funny to punch down. And it's like, have you met a bully? Like, a lot of people like to punch down and they find it very funny. And you can't say, well, they don't count because they're not funny, because somebody finds them funny, even if you don't. Like, why did Donald Trump become such a successful candidate? Partly because a lot of people found him very funny. And he had one joke during his campaign that I thought was very funny.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  That was just straightforward standup comedy where he was in, I think, Cleveland. And he's like, he's like, I'm in Cleveland, I need your vote. Wouldn't be in Cleveland if I didn't need your vote. You think I'd be in Cleveland if I didn't need your vote? No, I wouldn't. And like, that's just standard standup, just roasting the town they're in. And I was like, that's, you know, that's a funny joke. And, uh, but it's, it's being used for evil. But, you know, like any communication tool or any work of art, it can embody. Terrible things and still be an example of craft.

• 30:24Roman Mars?

  This reminds me of something that just the the power of the joke as a structure.

• 30:31Roman Mars?

  And and how it elicits a response. This reminds me of one time I was doing this, I was.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Is this a real story or a joke story?

• 30:37Roman Mars?

  This is a real story. I think I was.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  One time I was on the way to an interview and the craziest thing happened.

• 30:42Roman Mars?

  No, but I was doing an interview and it was about these seed banks that that store all of.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:47Roman Mars?

  Of all the seeds that are in the in the in the world so that if something catastrophic happens, they have all the seeds in this safe place so that it can replace the plant life that's been destroyed. And it was talking about the one in Svalbard, which is this remote, you know, like Arctic island. It was so cherished and protected and it's there underground in a vault. And then I asked, well, there's another one, like, where was the other one? And the person said, oh, Aleppo. And I laughed because Aleppo was undergoing this intense civil war where a bunch of people were dying. And it's just the structure of a joke of just like, we're going to describe the safest place that the seeds are safe. And then and then the other one is in Aleppo.

• 31:32Roman Mars?

  And I laughed.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  They're like, we have, we have, we have it, it's in the most extreme maximum security. Where's the other one? Oh, a toddler keeps it in his pants.

• 31:40Roman Mars?

  That's exactly it. Okay, so, so it was a genuine reaction. We put it out on the air and Assyrian wrote me and said, it really broke my heart that you laughed at that. And part of me was like, I get it. I get, I get what you're saying, but I couldn't help it. Like, it was, it was a joke setup, almost. And it's sort of the, the, the nature of the structure of a joke is so powerful that I was definitely not making fun of Aleppo or thinking about their suffering. I was definitely thinking of it as like putting it in the pants of a toddler, you know, in the sense of.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Well, you were thinking of it in terms of the pattern that had been set up. They had set up the pattern of these seeds are the most precious thing and we have to keep them in the safest possible place. And then the subversion of that pattern, which is Aleppo. And you're right that you were laughing at the structure of that joke. You were not laughing at the tragedy of what was going on at the time. But at the same time, you can't fault the emotional reaction of that audience member. If they have an individual reaction to the content of the joke, what the joke is about, how it's said, you can't fault that because. The audience is ultimately the decider for themselves of what is funny or not. They have a sense of humor. It's not a science of humor. It's a sense, you know, and it's individual for everyone.

• 32:57Roman Mars?

  Elliot, I gotta say, I love this book. I loved learning how your mind works a little bit more. And I'm curious, what do you want people to get out of it? Who are not going to be paid joke writers ever in their life?

• 33:08Speaker 01

  My hope is that, that first that you enjoy it. First that you laugh. It's a funny book.

• 33:12Roman Mars?

  It is.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  And first that you laugh at and enjoy it.

• 33:13Roman Mars?

  That's a funny thing. Like, because the thing is that people should recognize is when you're dissecting jokes and telling people how to write jokes. As examples, you use jokes. And so therefore it has tons of jokes in it. And you have a wide reaching survey of comedy of the last few decades.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I was trying very hard to get a wide variety of people, comedy types, comedy mediums. But even then, it's still just scratching the surface because there's so much. Comedy is so enormous. The comedy you see on TikTok is very much the same as comedy you see in a stand up. Comedy you see in a funny movie, comedy you read. And I use an example from the book Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Stern, which is a hilarious book, but it's hundreds of years old. It's all in the same continuum. They're all part of the same craft and the same art. And my hope is that you will then see a comedian or a TV show. And while you're watching it, you can buy into that illusion of this is just happening in front of me and it's really funny. These people are geniuses, but that afterwards you can appreciate a lot of work went into that. A lot of craft went into that.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  And now I have a greater appreciation for the people who did it because ultimately we're people. We live in a world of people. Everything's done for people. All the jokes are for people. Animals don't laugh at jokes particularly, but maybe the smarter gorillas. But anything you're saying is in order to connect from one person to another person. And so to be able to for a moment, share a thought or a feeling with another human being. And to have that moment of risk where you're not sure if they're going to connect with you. And then they don't, and you can be like, oh, that didn't work. Or they do, and you go, this is amazing. Like, that's the whole reason to create art. And it's certainly the reason that I create comedy.

• 34:48Roman Mars?

  Elliot, this has been fantastic. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Thank you, Roman. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

• 34:58Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg and edited by Delaney Hall, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Elliot Kalin's book is called Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense. It is fantastic. It is laugh-out-loud funny. You will learn a lot from it, even if you're not a comedy writer. We'll have a link on our website, and you can find it wherever books are sold. Kathy Too is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeón, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivien Leigh, LaSham Adon, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradling, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible

• 35:39Roman Mars?

  logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

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