How to write a joke, and whether to tell it

Plus our family almost gets a housecall from the world's biggest band

I don’t do pure stand up any more but I enjoy writing and performing jokes when I’m hosting events. There’s a big difference - at a corporate event you’re a familiar face there to announce awards, and if you surprise the audience by being funny they treat you like a king. At a stand up gig it’s much harder: they’ve paid cash specifically for you to make them laugh - there is no surprise, only suspicion and expectation. Given that humour comes from the unexpected you really have to perform a trick to turn a stand up audience around.

Still, making 400 hardware store owners laugh is not nothing. One disadvantage you have at a corporate gig is that they expect you to have made an effort to understand and refer to their business as part of your act, not just roll out the same schtick you do everywhere else. In stand up you can use material that has been tested a hundred times before (even if you pretend not to). At a corporate, you’re often trying out a joke for the very first time - no matter how good a joke writer you are there are no guarantees it’ll land, and yet you arguably have more to lose when you’re being paid by a business: you’re not just dying, you’re reflecting badly on them.

Ahead of an event like this I have a very busy phone. Without an audience to test jokes on, I send my ideas to trusted comics - Jeremy Corbett and Ben Hurley, usually - and they’ll send me back their reckons. We all quite enjoy the process - it’s more fun doing somebody else’s homework - and I’ll almost always change, abandon or add to a joke based on what i get back on the What’sApp.

I did a gig last week that a lot of people from Woolworths were attending, and I messaged Jeremy beforehand. What did he think of this line?:

I'm being careful not to swear or say anything wrong. This must be the only room in New Zealand where the C word is 'Countdown'

He liked it, but I still wasn’t sure. So much about a joke depends on the reaction - if everyone laughs, it’s a good-spirited reference to a topical elephant in the room; if nobody laughs, it’s a tone-deaf MC trying to humiliate the people who are paying his bills.

I planned to do the joke in the second half of the evening - when we’d established that I was a force for good, and when hopefully there was an appetite for something a bit cheekier.

I had it planned in my head - I would say something nice about the company, talk about how great the events team had been and then drop that line in.

But in the moment I swerved, and didn’t do the joke. God knows how that split second decision was made but I think it came down to what I had to lose versus what I had to gain. We’ll never know whether it would have worked - joke writing is a prediction market and you can’t know if you were right or wrong unless the event plays out.

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The funny and sometimes frustrating thing is that anything you ad lib on the night gets about 300% more laughs than the stuff you’ve written beforehand. Even if that Countdown joke isn’t for you, you can see how much work has gone into it. But at a live event you don’t seem to get extra points for that. 

I wrote other, safer, jokes for the night that went pretty well. But nothing got as a big a laugh as when a winner came up to get her trophy and one of her colleagues approached the stage to take a photo.

“Look, she’s come with her own photographer” I said, to roars of laughter from the 300 or so other people in the room. Now that is barely a joke - it’s just a guy pointing to something everyone can see and naming it. How is it fair that I get twice as much laughter for that as for the actual gags I spent precious hours writing?

Ideally, you’d scrap all the pre-written stuff and just do ad libs - but you can never guarantee how many of these opportunities you’ll get, and you also need to show you’ve taken the event seriously by doing some preparation.

Like the 6,000 steps I did pacing backstage before being introduced (hi! I bought a fitbit) the prep might not be strictly necessary, but the stakes are too high to risk not doing it. 

A visit from a very famous band

Photo/ Babiche Martens

I have a great relationship with The Beths, a New Zealand guitar-band who’ve achieved pretty much everything a New Zealand guitar-band can (appearing on NPR’s Tiny Desk, making Obama’s summer playlist, playing Coachella, along with glowing reviews in the music press and lots of international celebrity fans).

They played for me on NZ Live - our local equivalent of Tiny Desk - in around 2017, before they were even signed to a label. We’ve stayed in touch ever since - swapped favours and shared dinners - and our next meet up is at our house in November.

I was pretty excited to tell my girls The Beths would be visiting. The girls seemed excited too, though a few minutes later my eleven-year-old approached with a worried look on her face.

“What if one of them dies when they’re here?” she asked.

“Why would one of them die?”

“Well two of them died already,” she said.

I looked at her, trying to work out what she was talking about. Then suddenly it clicked.

“No darling,” I said. “It’s The Beths, not The Beatles.”