Skip the Joke
The other day, my husband and I were having a conversation with our 9-year-old daughter when something she said reminded us of the famous René Magritte painting of a pipe accompanied by the phrase “This is not a pipe” in French. As we usually do in such situations, we quickly headed to the Internet to show her a bunch of Magritte paintings and give her a five minute introduction to Surrealism.
We showed her the painting in question, of course: 
and then we looked at this:
and then this:
And we got to talking about that last one in particular—about how the artist sees the potential in nature, how he looks at reality and creates a heightened simulation of reality, perhaps even an idealized version of the real.
I would argue that this is what all artists seek to do, be they painters or poets or, yes, improvisers. But what interested me suddenly about this image of an artist looking at an egg and painting a bird—an image I’d seen a thousand times and even for a while put up in one of my classrooms as an alternative to a run-of-the mill inspirational poster—was the way in which this image so beautifully and suddenly reframed for me the old comedy adage: “skip the joke”.
“Skip the joke,” in conventional comedy wisdom, means don’t say the most obvious and cliché response to a familiar occurrence, image, or idea. It works when a scenario elicits such a universal response that nearly every single person in the audience simultaneously and instantaneously shares it. Often this is the result of a shared cultural context, or the presence of a universal image that everyone recognizes. And because everyone is thinking the same thing, you can take advantage of that shared response and move right away to a deeper sense of comedy present in the scenario.
Examples of skip the joke are more easily isolated and illustrated in a straight-forward and standard joke-telling scenario. “Sometimes my husband and I like to role play ‘Tiger Woods and his mistresses’. He takes out his one wood and a couple of balls…” With that sort of set up, this joke has clearly conjured up in everyone’s minds a sexual image: something about that wood and those balls is definitely headed for a hole. And because that’s the obvious conclusion here—both because of what we know about Tiger Woods’ extracurricular activities as well as the clear double entendres of “wood” and “balls”—the good comedian (well, the good comedian probably isn’t telling this joke in 2011, or at all, but this is the best example I can think of right now…) will skip the expected finish that everyone’s already told himself in his head, and take it further to a more true, more real place. “He takes out his one wood and a couple of balls…and then he blames me when things get a little rough and he chokes.” The joke still makes use of the sexual context, but this time it isn’t the expected and obvious sexual pun—it’s about the very real fallout of Tiger’s actions. It’s not the finish the audience had in its mind, but the second it’s said, it makes as much sense—and maybe more. Again, this isn’t a genius joke, but it does a good job of illustrating how skipping the obvious but less nuanced sexual pun takes us to a stronger insight into the larger implications of the scenario, and how Tiger’s sexual foibles relate to his professional failings.
The same applies to a standard improv scene as well. Imagine the exact same set up as a conversation between a husband and wife, with the husband proposing a bit of role-play and the wife responding with something like the second punchline. This not only gets at a deeper, funnier joke, it also gives us a hint into their relationship—he blames her for the shortcomings in their relationship, she calls shenanigans, etc.—that they can build on to take things even deeper as the scene progresses.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s wonderful to make a statement that validates the audience’s assumptions about a given scenario, but there’s an art to knowing when to say it and when to skip it. Say it when it’s not so obvious that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind what “it” is—when “it” is a hunch, and saying “it” explicitly can be rewarding to the audience for being astute enough to catch on. Don’t say it when it’s just a straight up fact. Usually you can tell if you misjudged the situation when, if you state the joke rather than skip it, it comes out as a “groaner.” Perhaps a groan is the Platonic opposite of a laugh. Hmm…I’m gonna have to think on that.
But back to Magritte’s painting and why it’s so great. The artist sees the egg. We, the viewer, see the egg. There’s no point in painting the egg. But how many of us see an egg and immediately think “bird”? We don’t, not usually. But when he shows it to us, it hits us. It’s something we know, but not something we think about all the time. Which is a good way to describe the effect of a successful joke as well.
In life, sometimes all we do is see the eggs. Sometimes the deeper meaning goes unrevealed. Or sometimes it takes a while (minutes, hours, weeks, years) for it to bubble to the surface. But in an improv scene, we don’t have the time and patience to deal with a lot of eggs. Not because people don’t sometimes do that, but because our audience is there to see a heightened—yes, artistic—version of life. They want to see us instantaneously look at the egg and show them the bird—the bird that we all know is inside that egg, but that only the artist can reveal.
Yes, I’m calling you an artist. You call into being relationships and people and events that have roots in the stuff of everyday life but whose branches spread into the expanse of human imagination. You’re dealing with elements that are at once familiar and novel, reflections of ourselves that reveal something more real than reality.
And to get to that stuff, you need know what needs saying, and what doesn’t. Skip the joke. Paint the bird.
Next week, join me as I seek to completely undermine everything I’ve just said and extoll the virtues of the “typical situation”.
