Still crazy after all these years...
Looking back at a favourite joke from The Framley Examiner.
I think the following six-word gag might be my favourite joke I’ve ever been involved with. (Maybe alongside ‘Uri Geller: I Can Do Dogshits’ from Viz, and the bit at the start of the ‘Cunk On Everything’ book where she’s revealed to have possibly written the foreword whilst sitting on a rollercoaster.)
It’s from the first page of Framley Examiner local newspaper classified adverts, back in 2001, in the days where there used to be classified adverts, and local newspapers. (And The Framley Examiner for that matter.)
It’s this one: ‘Child’s Paul Simon costume. Worn once.’
A nice person on social media flagged it up as a piece of short but craftsmanlike comic writing, so I was thinking about it. And I reckon it’s a good example of how these sort of joke shapes work, so maybe it’s worth a ponder.
How did we get to this joke? And why does it still make me (and other people) laugh?
The Paul Simon costume gag came from the very first classified ads writing session we ever did for Framley. Rob, Alex, Jason and I were trying to explore what the tone for the spoof might be, and how we might generate loads and loads of jokes. Every page would need on average one hundred potential laughs, we had randomly decided, to justify downloading what, at the time, was a pretty big image file over 56K broadband.
All four of us had by this point, we thought, managed to write a solid batch of news stories and display ads (especially after Jason had come up with his tone-setting ‘CYCLE LANE NOT AS LONG AS SMALL CYCLE’ piece that ended up being the first front page.) We’d fought shy of tackling the dense small ads pages, but we knew if we wanted to do an entire newspaper, the novelty would be that it included the sort of machine-gun gag pages that were the backbone of the great comedy books we loved (Not, Goodies, Python, Fegg), but nobody on the web had tried yet. This session was just me and Alex biting the bullet. So we took a real local newspaper each, and tried staring at it until it turned into jokes.
Here’s the very first scrawled set of notes. Paul Simon’s in the middle.
We knew this was a good way to generate jokes: looking at real newspapers while not quite paying attention. We tried reading too quickly, or with the paper upside down, or while talking, or slightly drunk, or tired, or with our eyes defocused. And then we’d write up whatever we’d mistakenly seen in the paper, straight, as if it were real. In Framley, we had decided the rule was that your overtired eyes were correct.
You know how people like to share phone pictures of advertising boards or newspaper headlines that they’ve accidentally (or deliberately) misread for comic effect? A snap of a shop front and a caption saying, ‘At first I thought this said…’ whatever… something ridiculous. It’s a standard double-take. You were walking past or distracted or tired, and your brain didn’t read all the letters and make up the words. It took a guess, and was wrong.
That’s how your brain reads everything, at speed, like the way predictive text works on your phone; trying to get to the end of the word before you do. It’s a shortcut. In order to think as fast as humans think, we aren’t modular in the way we absorb input, but predictive, using learned templates to anticipate what’s coming next. Most of the time our predictions are right, and so we don’t notice this process is going on, creating consciousness and reality from glimpses, guesses and patterns.
Absurdism is a game we play with this error detection process. With nonsense comedy, our brain skips through the incoming data as fast as ever, using its prediction engine to fill in what’s likely to be next. And it hits a nonsense obstruction, something really stupid and unexpected, just lying in the road where it wasn’t meant to be, and it stumbles. When your sense-parser goes back, unlike most times this happens, it’s not a mistake; it really was something incongruous. So what now? We used that quirk to generate jokes that would, in turn, play the same trick on the potential audience.
So, the original newspaper Alex was reading had a classified advert for a Paul Smith suit. We really like Paul Simon, so that particular template of letters was above Paul Smith in Alex’s predictive rolodex. Defocusing the brain, Alex knew ‘Paul S…’ was most likely to be ‘Simon’. It’s a Paul Simon suit.
If you’re not writing jokes, you’ll realise there’s no such thing as a Paul Simon suit, rewind and correct. But when making comedy, the trick is to turn mis-parsing of data into a joke. And you do that by going back to check the error, and glitching your brain into returning the result ‘no error’. And then changing the (comic) world to fit that.
Once we’ve done that, we come up with a way of selling the audience that same slip, and recovery - Paul Simon? / Oh, hang on Paul Smith – but with the added element that this time it is 100% a Paul Simon suit. And then the game for joke maker and joke receiver is: now make sense of that.
It’s how basic puns and Christmas cracker gags work too. The brain is tripped over by a word soundalike or lookalike or a conceptual rhyme. But we are in ‘play’ mode, instead of our everyday ‘survive’ mode, so instead of correcting the error, we leave it, and play with the novel idea, creating an impossible image where parrots eat all the painkillers in the jungle, or you can cross a sheep with a kangaroo, or a man called Doug has a spade in his head or whatever.
So, since we’ve decided there was no error, what is a Paul Simon suit? It could be the sort of suit the songwriter Paul Simon might wear. That’s not a big glitch, or a fun one. That’s just a suit. Or it could be a nice smart suit designed by the songwriter Paul Simon. There are plenty of implications to unpack there, but they’re not particularly funny.
A… Paul… Simon… suit? What if it’s not a smart formal dress suit. What if it’s like a spacesuit? An outfit for doing something? Or even a Spider-Man suit or a Batman suit? How about fancy dress? And then we’re in better territory, because immediately we’re thinking ‘costume’. And maybe the joke is actually ‘Paul Simon costume’, and the next leap is to why would someone dress up as Paul Simon.
This is getting good. Because he’s a pop star who doesn’t have a trademark stage outfit – he’s not Adam Ant or one of Slipknot – so what sort of costume even is a Paul Simon costume? Well, it would have to be iconic, so everyone at a fancy dress party would know you were dressed as Paul Simon, so – and Alex and I agreed on this instantly – it’s definitely the one off the front of Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits. Great. That’s a funny idea. A polyester mass-produced toy fancy dress version of some familiar but perfectly ordinary 1970s New York middle-aged songwriter clothes.
But surely the bestselling fancy dress outfits aren’t for grown ups – they’re stuff like Cinderella or Buzz Lightyear? Or costumes kids put on for Hallowe’en. Oh! Paul Simon’s quite wee. So maybe that’s the joke.
‘Child’s Paul Simon costume.’
And we really laughed. Probably for ten minutes. Talking about what the implications were.
When we came to type it to the page we added two more words: ‘worn once’. It’s a conscious reference to Ernest Hemingway’s shortest-possible-short-story. If you know that, there’s an extra level in turning a tragedy into a comedy, but the main idea was to imply a rich backstory, not just a single weird image. We did that a lot, adding a kicker, to help the reader in, to say ‘there’s more’. To lead people to imagine the full narrative behind a simple cut-and-shut idea… It tells you that we’ve been laughing for a long time about the poor kid who got the shitty end of the dressing-up box.
(I think I remember saying it was the logical extension of forcing your kid to wear a Ramones babygro. Musical identity imposed without consent. This kid doesn’t know Paul Simon; the poor toddler’s music taste is strictly Wind The Bobbin Up. And I’m thinking about the well-meaning but accidentally cruel boomer-folk-pop-loving parent who forced their kid to be the only one at the softplay birthday party dressed as Paul fucking Simon. The tantrum after. The sheepish purchase of an Elsa-from-Frozen outfit to make up for it. Peace restored. And then the phone call to the local newspaper small ads department to flog the unwanted blazer, hat and moustache.)
We’d come to call those long stories that we’d boiled down to half a dozen words ‘WinZip jokes’, after the compression program that used to condense data-stuffed computer folders down to manageable size for emailing. Sharing a lot of data in the smallest possible package.
And I think the true magic of a good Winzip gag is that while trying to stuff all the funny ideas into a tiny zippable cabin bag, something got packed down alongside it, like an atmospheric contaminant at the factory. And, luckily and happily, we found that the trapped substance bursts out when people unzip the file:
Hysteria.
We’d take fifteen minutes of giggles and pack it down to a tiny size, and then zip it shut, full to bursting. All someone else could see sticking out the top was the label. ‘Child’s Paul Simon costume, worn once’. But all the giggly garbage was still inside. It’s as concise as we could get it, but those six words are the shortest possible list of ingredients to make that hysteria again yourself.
If you’re doing longer-form writing, you can pack writing room hysteria into a line rich with implication of a character’s backstory. Or a nod to some unseen adventure or concealed character note. As long as the tiny clue has all the elements for the audience to finish the gag, and explore the implications. The packing down, the reduction of each joke to a tight little stock cube bursting with potential flavour is why a script gets better the more you edit it. It’s why 22 minutes is a great format for really dense comedy. Think of The Simpsons. Every skated-over gag worthy of a bit of consideration, revealing the original laughter in the writers’ room. Depth and complexity in comedy doesn’t have to mean ‘long’. It can just be quick, but hidden.
Maybe it’s why collaboration is so helpful for good comedy, so someone is laughing while you’re working, for the air to fill with laughter before you cork it for later use. All of my favourite Framley jokes have the residual imprint of us pissing ourselves laughing. And you can do it on your own. Read your stuff back to yourself, see if it can still satisfy. I don’t really like writing, but I love having written, because then, if I’ve packed the gag down small enough, I get to read it again, pared to the bone, and trip myself over. Check you’ve not left so many clues that your own joke won’t surprise you with its implications.
It’s unfashionable, but I suspect you’re meant to laugh at your own jokes, so that there is that residual echo of laughter trapped inside the zipped-up package. ‘This joke was recorded before a live audience, and then freeze dried, to preserve its comic nutrients, so it would last forever, for consumption in space.’
Maybe hysteria is the atmospheric irritant that needs to be floating about, so it can be accidentally preserved when you zip up your package of comic data, so it can pop out when someone opens it up.
That’s what ‘Child’s Paul Simon costume. Worn once’ means to me.
My new book ‘BE FUNNY OR DIE’ on the science, craft and culture of comedy is out in March. Pre-order it here…
THE INCOMPLETE FRAMLEY EXAMINER (‘Funniest book of all time… I ordered five copies myself’ - Bob Odenkirk) is available from bookshops…