I am not a writer. I am not a comedian. Anything that follows is open for correction.

 I want to know what makes a good joke. A good joke that is always good. This by nature excludes any current event related jokes, those are generally to easy anyways. What I want is to write a funny joke that could be told years later and still be funny. Typically knock knock jokes are good as are plays on words. But knock knock jokes are stupid and my vocabulary skills were stunted in college (you don’t really develope a mastery of the English language by watching movies instead of reading books for the English classes). Then there are also the story jokes and the prop jokes. Story jokes can be to long, prop jokes well Carrot Top is only mildly entertaining. So perhaps what needs to be done is to define a few different categories of jokes and go from there. After defining each category then rules for generating jokes can be established and the jokes can commence. So for the next week I will be working on listing what I feel to be different joke categories. So feel free to leave your thoughts on the subject. Any input would be welcomed, but not necessarily appreciated or used. And think high-level, as in the style of the joke, the subject matter of the joke and length of the joke. A little background on why I am doing this: After explaining the basics of the knock-knock joke to a coworker (English is a second language for them) they proceeded to work on a joke of their own. The following day the laid this nugget on me:

Person1: Knock-Knock
Person2: Who’s there?
Person1: Amnesia.
Person2: Amnesia who?

Granted the first knock-knock joke I introduced to them was the Interupting Cow. So While they got the basics down, I feel as though their KK-joke could be improved. And that got me thinking, well how do you write a good solid joke?

Here is an initial list of categories for types of jokes to get things started:

  • Knock-Knock
  • Political
  • Word-play/Alternate definition
  • Insult/Your Mom/Polish/Blond/Redneck/etc…
  • Holiday
  • Adult
  • Prop/Visual
  • The Pun

That is a good start for now. Now to leave you for now enjoy the following two jokes:

A pirate walks into a bar with a stearing wheel in his pants. The bartender says, “Hey, you have a stearing wheel in your pants.” To which the pirate replies:”Arrrrrrr, it’s drive’n me nuts.”

The following joke was told to my sister, who heard the punch line wrong (she heard “bam”) and thought it was incredibly funny and proceeded to tell her kids. Only to find out the actual punch line later. As her brother, this just made the joke even better.

Question: What does a fish say when it hits a cement wall?
Answer: Dam!

So what category would you say they belong to?