David Shoemaker (2) (1964–)

Who understands wisecracks better: this self-appointed expert, or me? You decide

I don’t know why I do this to myself. When I see a book on humor, I want to read it to learn what they have discovered that I don’t know. And every single damned time, the answer is nothing. Except for tear-streaming boredom and the overwhelming desire to talk to the author directly and straighten them out. Comedy does not take kindly to analysis. But rather than treat readers to a hyper-critical review, I am show more instead going to give readers a critical review plus real, actual, employed humor that demonstrates what it really is.

The book in question is called Wisecracks by a philosophy professor called David Shoemaker. He is sincere enough, and highly skilled, but not in humor. He makes up for it, to a certain extent, with a lot of research. For example, he is fascinated that in the documentary Comedians, Jerry Seinfeld listens to someone’s new bit in the greenroom, and simply says “That’s funny.” What Shoemaker does not know is that Seinfeld was behaving exactly like everyone in the business does. They never laugh at someone’s act. Either they understand the bit and its potential perfectly or they don’t want to miss a throwaway line, but comics have heard it all, repeatedly, and never laugh at performance. This is the kind of failure committed repeatedly in Wisecracks. Get someone in the business to consult on it.

The book begins with unendurable attempts to define wisecracks. Shoemaker poses a definition and then says no, that doesn’t work. Then he tries another and another, about a dozen in total, and fails them all. He ends up collecting all the aspects as a “kitchen sink” collection, which provides no insight into the magic of wisecracks whatsoever. Take your pick; something here is bound to be right for every situation.

He is forever trying to divide everything into (useless) buckets: “The four major objective theories on offer are relief/release, superiority, incongruity and play. In slightly more detail, they claim, respectively, that what makes things funny is (a) their causal power to relieve or release built-up tension; (b) their revelation of someone’s superiority over someone or something; (c) their mismatch of some kind between expectations and reality; or their playful, nonserious features. All of these theories fail, however.” Is this someone you want to learn humor from?

Worse, he then starts to stray. He gets caught up in jokes rather than wisecracks, and then pranks, riddles, insults, comic bits and mockery. And each one takes him farther and farther away from wisecracks. I’d say only a quarter of the book deals with wisecracks. But the worst rabbit hole he falls into is morality. There is endless discussion of the morals of telling certain kinds of jokes, or telling jokes to or about certain kinds of people. As he reaches out farther and farther, he discusses the humor appreciation of autistics and psychopaths. He posits that certain things, like rape, are totally out of bounds and unsuitable for jokes. They must all fail, he says. Then he lists a bunch of comics who tell rape jokes, and very successfully. Another wasted segment in the book. If readers want to know about morality in comedy, I refer them to Hogan’s Heroes, a 1960s sitcom about the hilarity of a World War II German prisoner of war camp, Mel Brooks’ Springtime For Hitler, or Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. Humor doesn’t give a damn about morality. Never has.

So let me straighten this out. This says it all:

Wisecracks come from listening well. Someone reacts to something said or seen, sending the conversation in a different direction. They are a function of context and delivery. And only context and delivery. So a badly delivered wisecrack will fall flat, as will one that has nothing to do with what is underway. Contextual problems (such as why jokes don’t necessarily play well to other cultures), are avoided in wisecracks, which by this definition are automatically in context and therefore relatable for all parties at the time. Shoemaker manages to bypass all of this, though most of these points get at least a passing mention somewhere in the book.

The ultimate tale of delivery comes from the team of George Burns and Gracie Allen. He was a standup comedian, and he just needed Gracie to be his straightman in vaudeville shows. But the act fell flat again and again, until Burns realized she was the one with the great delivery, and not him. Her very presence made his laugh lines fall flat. He continued to write all of their material (for decades until her death), but he gave her all the laugh lines while he played it straight. The result was legendary.

The best place to see wisecracks on display is the gameshow The Hollywood Squares. Nine celebrities get peppered with idiotic questions from Peter Marshall. They come up with a wisecrack immediately, which gives them time to think of the real answer. You can actually see Paul Lynde racing to find the answer after his initial wisecrack. But context is everything:

Peter Marshall: Paul, in the bedroom, what is the one thing you should never do?
Paul Lynde: Point and laugh.

Peter Marshall: Mel, your wife is drawing a bath for you, and she adds baking soda to the water. Why is she doing that?
Mel Brooks: Because my wife likes a clean Jew with a light crust.

When I was in college, they ran the 1930s film Reefer Madness with an intro of a 1920s two reeler of Douglas Fairbanks Sr going nuts on cocaine. It was silent. Not even canned music. So the entirely stoned audience of about a thousand filled the void with loud, sophomoric comments until they could think of no more. The comments slowed to a crawl and then ceased. This was my opening. I counted to five (several times, because there was still the occasional crack, like the last kernels of popcorn to pop), and in the total, heavy silence I called out, as if in mortal panic: “I can’t hear anything!” I destroyed. Got 1000 people giving me the biggest laugh of the night, and engendering a whole new round of comments that lasted the rest of the film. That’s the power of a wisecrack.

It doesn’t have to relate to morality, Shoemaker’s obsession. It has to be in context and be delivered well.

When I was elected a town councilor, the newbies on council had to give a little bio at the first public meeting. It was so boring that when they finally got to me (W is always last), I said, in all seriousness: “My name is David Wineberg. (Two second silent pause while everyone wondered what the hell was wrong with me) …. I like long walks on the beach…“ and that was a far as I got. The hall erupted in laughter. You could eventually hear some people explaining to their seatmates why that was funny. So the laughter kept renewing itself for a good 30 seconds. A great start to my career in politics.

I was staffing a booth at an antiques show in New York, when a clump of people approached. The rosy-cheeked man in front walked right up to me and announced: “I’m from Australia!” To which I said “Can’t be helped.” His jaw dropped, and he was speechless. His wife, and the other couple laughed out loud. The wife came over and said to me: “Good on you” in perfect Australian. Apparently her husband had been doing this all over the show and everywhere they went in New York, and they just put up with it quietly. I unexpectedly gave them the outlet to laugh at him with my wisecrack.

Better still: when I was Marketing VP of an online startup, we had a management meeting of about 20 managers, with the COO at the front of the classroom. Someone was called upon to give projections of our traffic. He was so boring, the COO said: “You’re such an asshole.” To which the report giver, offended, replied “Why am I an asshole?” The COO tossed it to us, the sharp, hungry wolves, who always had an instant comeback for such straightlines. Our reputation was such that he did it silently, by simply turning his head toward us. That’s all it took. Except nothing happened. I couldn’t believe my luck. I began counting to five while at the same time searching desperately for something the report giver had said that I could echo back at him. I found it, repeated it to myself so I had control of it, and hoped we could make it to five seconds. But at four, the COO turned his head to us again, and I knew he would call it off and ruin everything. So I blurted out: “He’s trying to err, on the conservative side,” which is something the report giver had just said about his whole projections effort. The audience did not laugh at first. It shrieked. Twenty people made the room shake with their high-pitched shriek like I had only heard once before. I had topped them, and they appreciated it. The best wisecrack won. The COO ended up having to stop the laughter. And people congratulated me.

Years before, on my radio phone-in show. I had our gardening expert on, and he told a caller to use some specific ground cover in his situation, because it was denser. The caller said “What?” And the expert repeated it. The caller said what again, and the expert said “Denser, more dense.” And then it happened again. This was going on too long so I piped in with “Caller: think .… of a Jewish ballerina.” My expert shrieked so high and so loud I was sure he had torn the ribbon in our shared mic. The engineer told me we were still on the air, so we went on to the next call, but I’m sure most of the 50,000 listeners I had on Saturday mornings got a totally unexpected laugh, on a gardening phone-in show of all things.

Oh, let me tell you one more. Just last year, new friends of ours agreed to go to lunch at a Thai restaurant 20 miles away (there are none closer) that I found and that none of us had ever tried or even knew about. My wife called to make a reservation for lunch, just to play it safe. When we got there, the place was empty. They gave us the biggest, best table, and we enjoyed a truly fabulous lunch with the whole place to ourselves. Took over two hours, and no one else came in. On the way back, everyone praised it and promised any time we wanted to come back they were ready. This food was just the best they’d ever had out where we live. Great find. From the back seat of the car, I said: “Thank god we had a reservation!” After laughing at that, my friend in the front said it over to himself, and started laughing all over again.

That too is the power of wisecracks. As you can probably tell, there is potential for a great deal of satisfaction cracking wise.

Those were all my own wisecracks. Now let me tell you my favorite one that had nothing to do with me. In the 1930s, comedian Will Rogers was invited to the Vatican. There was the usual introduction: Holiness: Mister Will Rogers of the United States of America.” Rogers came forward and as he was shaking the pope’s hand, he leaned forward and said softly into the pope’s ear: “Sorry. I didn’t catch the name.”

Shoemaker thinks he has to drill way down to divide jokes from wisecracks, but I don’t think any reader would have difficulty seeing the difference. A joke is structured, memorized, rehearsed, and edited from real audience experience. A wisecrack is an inspired moment of reaction. The book is Wisecracks and jokes should not burden it.

In the discussion on senses of humor, Shoemaker determines instead that there are stereotypes of humor. He drills down so far he misses numerous points at the top. For example, among stereotypes there are mean jokes, racist jokes, occupational jokes and so on, each of which can hit an audience the wrong way. It’s the morality problem again. What he doesn’t see is that they do not make up a large library of stereotypes; they are all the same: moron jokes. You just change the label from blond to lawyer to Polish to redneck or whatever you want to make fun of, and adapt the same joke that way. I could have saved him ten pages right there.

He veers off into pranks, which used to be called practical jokes. He discusses Punk’d, the Ashton Kutcher show where Kutcher got to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars planning a practical joke, hiring actors, vehicles, writers, whatever. And nothing at all to do with wisecracks. The result was always cruel, but the fact cameras were everywhere prevented the victim from slugging him. Ha ha ha. Is it moral to be cruel?

Let me tell you my best practical joke. In the turbulent 60s, there was a major incident called the Sir George Williams computer riot. Radicals invaded the computer center of the SGWU (Now Concordia U.) building and threw boxes of paper and whatever they could rip out and lift, down to the street about 15 stories below. I was there on the ground, and wondered what all the paper was. This was a computer center, after all. I found blank letterhead, letterhead envelopes, and whole sheets of checks. So I picked some up. I had no idea what to do with them, but thought they’d come in handy one day.

And one day they did. I decided to expel my best friend, who was a student there. I typed up an official letter, expelling him because he was Jewish, and signed the Dean’s name to it. The check refunded his entire year’s tuition. It was all so real-looking. I even mailed it from a mailbox near the university so it wouldn’t look like it came from our neighborhood. I knew he would laugh after the initial shock. It was so obvious.

Except. I hadn’t counted on his mother, who I did not know opened his mail. When he came home from school, she was beside herself. What are we going to do? What am I going to tell your father? How could this happen? Where else can you apply? We’ll never live this down.

He looked at the letter and knew exactly where it came from. He spent a lot of time calming her down. Eventually, all was well again. He later gave me hell, but I got the laugh for a practical joke that went far beyond my modest hopes. Cost to produce? A four cent stamp.

Back at Wisecracks, for all of Shoemaker’s moralizing and rationalizing, he entirely missed the latest trend – cringe. People like Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Dave Chappelle love to make their audiences want to curl up in womb position under the seat. And yet they keep coming back for more. How’s the morality meter doing? So the book is a strange creature, incomplete, overextended, and way too intense.

I’ll leave you with one more, an insult made to me by my best friend, a Hollywood talent manager. We still spoke regularly after he moved to LA. We would spend a good hour reciting great new lines we’d heard, criticizing various comedians, and basically reaffirming we both knew the comedy business better than everyone. At the end of one such call, he begged off, and after saying Bye, as we were both hanging up, he said, as an afterthought, slightly off mic, “Asshole.” I know he smiled at my laugh as I hung up, and to this day, it’s my favorite shot at me. A wonderful memory and a great laugh I don’t often offer. But clearly, you have to know your audience.

The conclusion to the book helpfully lists the takeaways Shoemaker intends. This is important, because I sure couldn’t see them from actually reading the thing. Unfortunately, they amount to absolutely nothing. The top takeaway is that wisecracks can cause moral trouble. Really? That’s the most important thing to remember about this whole exercise? The rest are no better, either.

If readers want to sharpen their wisecracking talents, they should sign up for Q&A social media sites. There are so many stupid and badly written questions there, users have a field day with them. The key is to think of something instantly. If you have to think about it or come back to it later, don’t bother. This is an exercise in wit-sharpening, in instant reaction, and there are always thousands of questions to answer. Wisecracks are known, understood, and appreciated. They are satisfying and memorable. And nobody cares about the moral aspects.

The takeaway here? Let’s just say I would not have written a book called Wisecracks the way David Shoemaker did.

David Wineberg show less