I went out with a zookeeper...
On finally getting to hear 'the year's best joke' in its proper context.
This has been brewing since August. Because I wanted to see the thing in context. I now have. And the late breaking news is that the Best Joke Of The Fringe 2023 was in fact, brilliant. You know. This one:
‘I went out with a zookeeper. Turned out he was a cheetah.’
‘Best Joke Of The Fringe’ is one of the worst ideas in the world, and, unfortunately if you work in comedy, it’s one of the few moments when the craft of comedy makes headlines. The Dave TV channel’s clickbait brainwave has taken over the annual press release churn of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the extent that it’s very likely that you might not remember that (the fantastic) Ahir Shah won this year’s what-used-to-be-called The Perrier Award for best show, but you might well recall everyone getting cross about the zookeeper joke.
When Lorna Rose Treen won the joke award this year, I was up in Edinburgh. The playground-grade pun was so strange out of context that I became slightly obsessed with it. Had it been misquoted? People were getting angry online. ‘If this is the state of comedy, no wonder nothing’s funny any more!’ I read a few articles by journos and comics alike using it as a stick to beat a nostalgic bucket for the good old days of proper bloody jokes, often referring to the greats who’d played Edinburgh before, and comparing the feeble meat on offer now (I presume in many cases without having seen the show, or possibly even having been to Edinburgh in years.)
A few technician comedy writer mates even tried to rewrite the gag to make it work better. I’ll confess, I even joined in. ‘I picked up my last boyfriend at the zoo. Turned out he was a cheetah.’ That sells it a bit better, I thought. Leaves a gap of meaning at the start, more space where you can bolt the hinge.*
Julia, my other half, had already been to see Lorna’s show at the Fringe – she’s a prepared sort of person and had pre-booked a ticket before we went up. She loved it. The show had sold out, partly due to the fuss about the lollystick-gag, I presume, so I did myself a favour, Googled when Lorna was doing the show again near me, and grabbed a ticket for the Soho Theatre at the end of October. I love it when Past Me buys Current Me a present.
So I saw the show at last this week, and I can report, with pleasure, that the joke is great in context, the show is great, Lorna is completely great, and that she deserves any awards she can get, especially if they make more people come and see her shows, which are, as I say, great. I laughed and felt wonderful afterwards, and a conspiracy of audience members all left the room high on silliness and fun and nonsense, and it was everything comedy should be.
Lorna even did a bow after the pun, and got a round of applause from the people who knew it was *that* joke. And the joke was delivered with a flourish, in character, and context, part of a conspiracy between performer and audience that a kids’ cracker joke at this point is somehow not only adequate, but perfect – in the same way Vic and Bob rattle off creaky puns in the intros to their TV shows, with that playground-grade mixture of delight and shame. That’s how we all exchange puns. We groan. We call them ‘dad jokes’. We put them at the end of shaggy dog stories as a trick. We deliver them with a wink, or a grin, or a wah wah trumpet, and that’s the game.
Thinking of that joke now, with Lorna throwing it out in character as a Film Noir vamp, chainsmoking her way through endless bent joke-shop cigarettes, passed into her mouth with the smoothness of a Leslie Nielsen clowning routine, drawling crap Chandleresque half-puns, while stepping over a pile of laundry, wearing Brownie socks, on the verge of cracking up at how she’s getting away with this nonsense, is giving me the giggles right now.
You know how Eric Morecambe does that dad-level gag tossing an imaginary ball into a paper bag, with a ‘wahey’, and expects applause every time? It’s that joke. Not good enough, and yet completely good enough because of how it’s sold. So this is timeless comic schtick. Pulling off these sort of half-good-enough gags with style is a demonstration of basic comic technique. Lorna trained under Philippe Gaulier. She’s a clown. A professional. Trained to handle fissile bad-gags without blowing off her red nose. She totally knows what she’s doing.
So the Dave award did its job, I suppose, in that it made me go and check out a performer’s debut show and laugh like a drain.
But it also did a bad thing in that it reduced the discussion of the health of modern comedy to the merits of a single Dad pun. Any voting process on ‘the best art’ is mad apples-and-oranges bullshit, but we accept the Oscars exist and that you can have a favourite record, so I’ll leave that aside. But in this case, we should ask whether it’s a good idea to take a public vote on contextless one-liners and then make that a vote on comedy itself – which is what keeps happening. That’s not comedy. That’s puns. But that is, sadly, how the country’s biggest annual showcase for new comics now exists in the wider consciousness.
The problem is that Dave’s PR team need very, very broad jokes, that can be printed short-form as a list in loads of outlets. Also, when they take the list of printable puns that their (I presume) cash-in-hand team of hired gig goers have collected from everyone’s crafted comedy shows, and then poll the public, the winners won’t be the best written jokes, or even the best delivered jokes, because every single one of them will be out of context.
The jokes that will get the most votes will be the ones that *everyone* can get. The very basic ones. Any joke that requires context or extra data or even for you to think for a minute will, over many votes, get marginally fewer thumbs-up than a joke that is unarguably a joke; even if that joke is a lollystick-level kids’ gag about a cheetah. We all agree it’s a joke, so its killer USP is that it won’t be rejected. It’s incredibly acceptable as a joke. It’s very, very broad. Even though that’s not, with very few exceptions, the best comedy. The gag everyone likes – often – is a gag nobody loves (but everyone understands). And a poll like this skews that way naturally. That’s, I imagine, how a joke like this – one that can’t possibly sing without context and delivery – rippled to the top of the pile. It won by default. Nobody *didn’t* understand it. That’s enough.
Comedy is incredibly subjective. A joke can go broad, or go deep. For a joke to go deep, rather than broad, it has to be delivered to people ready to welcome that gag, understand the resonances, and say it belongs to them. That’s how in-jokes work, or jokes about our towns, or friends, or families, or hobbies, or, for that matter, prejudices. It’s why we usually laugh at gags that trigger our specific cultural and social references much harder than we do at generic gags. Comedy is tribal. The simplest tribe you can gather is a small Edinburgh room, for a comic who knows how to unite and delight that tribe. A successful show is a scratch-built village, all agreeing on the terms of what they find funny for an hour.
Dave’s Joke Of The Fringe list ignores that part of the craft of comedy completely. The most prominent PR moment for comedy (unfortunately) doesn’t use the tools of its declared art form. It just uses puns. Because it needs to work in a newspaper sidebar or listicle, so the other tools are put beyond use.
Puns are unarguable because they have no context ¬– beyond a shared dictionary and accent, maybe. They work for ‘everyone’ who speaks that language in the same way. And because they are the simplest tools in the box, they are unarguable – that word does sound like that other word. So this is a joke.
Which is why they’re the first joke form that kids master. But even kids get bored and start doing character-based un-jokes almost immediately. Why did the chicken cross the road? To demonstrate that delivering a bad joke within the persona of someone who should be delivering a good joke has one extra layer of comic craft than just doing a pun, and we have formed a conspiracy that now understands the joke-teller as a character, and that’s way more sophisticated. Six-year olds get that.
Polls of ‘best gags’ take comedy out of the delightful conspiracy of a show, and a room. Any good performer wins the trust of an audience, and understands how to deliver a blend of wordplay, physicality, movement, character, implication, how to manipulate expectation and release. Even if comedy uses puns, it is always so much more than the efficient delivery of homonyms. (I’ve seen Tim Vine, reigning master of the contemporary pun, die on his arse when the first introduction of his persona as King Dad Joke didn’t land... Shocking to watch, but it demonstrates that there is solid character work going on even in a show that’s just one-liners.)
Focusing attention on gags might seem to be the best way to judge comedy fairly. But it’s the opposite. Comedy is layered and complex and it’s reductive that we have decided that once a year we pretend it’s just... you know... jokes.
I suspect that, though maybe it was initiially well intentioned, the annual Dave joke poll seems to act now more as a Two Minutes’ Hate for the hell-in-a-handcart things-were-better-in-my-day columinist-nostalgist tendency than it does as a publicity drive for comedy as a craft. It’s more important to generate disbelief and incredulity at what passes for comedy these days than it is to celebrate the craft and achievements of the hard working comics at the toughest endurance festival in the calendar. It’s turned into the Turner Prize, and picked up the ‘my kid could do that’ modern art thing. And that’s sad. Because every comic who bankrupts themselves at the Fringe to showcase their skills, delight their audiences, and possibly build a career, deserves better.
We would never do this to drama. We haven’t replaced the BAFTAs with a poll of contextless lines from thrillers where the killer is named. Because that’s the best bit, right? That wouldn’t end well. “And the public vote for best drama goes to ‘It’s you, Mark’, from The Murderings.” And then a load of articles insisting that even though the journalist hasn’t seen the series, ‘It’s you, Mark’ didn’t make them as excited as they were when they watched the whole of Prime Suspect, so what the hell is happening to the world of police thrillers, if that’s the best they can manage, these new dramatists.
We all understand that drama is more complicated than that.
But so is comedy.
( * Lovely comedy brainbox and super-producer Adam Tandy (Inside No 9, Detectorists, Thick of It) just messaged me with an even more pleasing version, which made me punch the air with joy, because it has a scorching rule of three in it:
‘My last boyfriend worked at the zoo. But he wasn’t a keeper. He was a cheetah.’
Which is masterful, and has an extra joke in the middle. But it arguably wouldn’t have worked in character at the show, because that’s not the joke she’s doing – which is a Hollywood vamp doing crap playground jokes that are almost (but not quite) worth telling. Maybe the double punchline would have been great, and got a bigger laugh. But the shit version got a huge laugh, perhaps because it pulled the rug Chicken-Road style. And my heart says the crafted version is sort of too well written. Heresy. Certainly, Adam’s is the sort of joke that should 100% win Dave’s Best Joke Of The Fringe award. But sometimes I’d argue – against all my technician’s judgement – there’s more to jokes than being great jokes… A thing that I worry that writers like me often forget and clowns simply seem to know…)
If you like this sort of thing, BE FUNNY OR DIE, my new book on comedy is out in March 2024. Pre-order a copy here.