Rivers.
The death of Joan Rivers has got me thinking about comedy, which would probably please her, especially about comics as writers and what we can learn from them. Jokes fly by. We can forget they are the result of a strategic approach to language, sequencing, and timing.
All writers can learn from studying the work of great comics — especially in the age of Twitter, where economy and a sharp point matter. It is said that humor does not lend itself to analysis, that you either get it or you don’t. But I don’t buy that. I believe there are patterns to Rivers’ most interesting work that can be traced, not to imitate her voice or style, but to incorporate into our own.
Here are the lessons I’ve learned from Miss Rivers:
1. Start well, finish better. Journalists know how to start well, but their work too often peters out, an effect of inverted pyramid thinking. Comics cannot afford bait and switch. Jokes begin with something interesting or enticing then lead somewhere better. Henny Youngman did it in four famous words: “Take my wife, please.”
Check out these pithy quotes from Joan Rivers, which I’ve selected from a People magazine collection and other sources:
- “My best birth control now is to just leave the lights on.”
- “I have no sex appeal; if my husband didn’t toss and turn, we’d never have had the kid.”
- “I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”
Each has a punchline, what journalists might call a kicker, but notice that each begins with subject matter designed to entice: birth control, sex appeal, housework.
2. Be willing to express what others are thinking but are afraid to say. The comic is the antidote to the conventional, puritanical, sentimental and politically correct. In the Middle Ages this was known as “licensed misrule,” a privilege that would let the court jester speak uncomfortable truths to power.
- “Grandchildren can be f–––ing annoying – how many times can you go ‘And the cow goes moo and the pig goes oink?’ It’s like talking to a supermodel.”
- “Don’t make friends with your dogs! The sons of bitches will literally die ahead of you and cause you grief.”
- “You don’t need big boobs to be feminine. Look at Liberace.”
- “She’s so fat, she’s my two best friends.”
Consider the targets for these jokes: children, supermodels, dogs, a fat woman and a gay man. Now think of how many other social contexts – outside of comedy – such commentary would be unacceptable. Should journalists think of themselves as the “wise fools” of contemporary storytelling?
3. Mix the tragic and the comic. Be willing to put things together that, at first glance, do not fit. No one was better at this than Shakespeare. Just after Macbeth butchers the king in his sleep, a drunken porter offers the audience a hilarious soliloquy on the disabling effects of alcohol consumption on sexual performance. Some critics attacked Shakespeare for mixing comedy and tragedy in this manner.
Consider this recent joke by Joan Rivers on her return to “The Tonight Show” with its new host Jimmy Fallon. She is apologizing for being late: “They sent this big stretch Mercedes limo for us, it got stuck, it wouldn’t move for two and a half hours. And I’m thinking, you know, the Germans killed six million Jews, you can’t fix a fucking carburetor?”
4. Write not just what you know, but what you fear. For Rivers, nothing seemed half-hearted. She harvested both the fruits and the weeds of her own experience. Many of the issues she confronted were about the essential crises of life: loss. The jokes and her relationship to an audience would become her primary form of therapy:
- “I don’t think I’m good in bed; my husband never said anything, but after we made love he’d take a piece of chalk and outline my body.”
- “The fashion magazines are suggesting that women wear clothes that are ‘age appropriate’ … for me that would be a shroud.”
- “I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I’d look like without plastic surgery.”
I once heard the great reporter Francis X. Clines of the New York Times encourage journalists never to apologize for writing about death and dying. “Our job is to tell the morbid truth,” he said.
Jimmy Fallon asked Joan Rivers if she was afraid of dying. “My father was a doctor,” she answered. So I was around death all my life.” A good start, but then comes a better finish: “I was very used to it because he was a shitty doctor.”
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