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06/05/2008: A Dirty Joke


The day that Harvey Korman died, I heard a little excerpt played on the radio of a comedy bit that I'd never heard before, taken from a sketch he performed with Danny Kaye. I've located the whole sketch here, but you don't need to watch the whole thing since other than one funny joke -- the one I heard excerpted for the radio -- it's pretty dire. But the joke worked for me. Here it is:

HARVEY
Class, for a baby's bath, what's the most important thing you absolutely need?

DANNY
A dirty baby?

Now, listening to this being performed, it's clear early on what the joke is. It's one of those "Stating the Obvious" jokes that I've talked about before. Once you hit "the most important thing," you know that's the joke. You probably already know that the answer is some version of "the baby." And yet the joke made me chuckle. Because of the adjective.

It's not just that adjectives make things funnier, although they often do. Moist, bendy, pointy, itchy -- they are all great words that spice up any sentence. But in this case, "dirty" is doing something beyond that. Can you bathe a clean baby? Well, if you take bathing to include the idea of removing dirt, then, no, you can't. So the answer makes literal sense, but it also raises the idea of NEEDING a dirty baby -- needing something that is normally undesirable. For me, it even raises the image of someone purposefully dirtying a baby so that they can bathe it. Funny!

The joke isn't in the words, of course, but in the concept. These are all the same joke (even though they don't all work exactly the same way -- since you can't purposefully make a chicken raw, for example, it doesn't quite resonate the way the baby one does):

What do you need to cook a chicken? Raw chicken.
To fix an engine? A broken engine.
To censor a movie? A dirty movie.
To cure the common cold? Well, first you need a cold...

If you wanted to use these, you'd massage the language a bit, but those are the hearts of the lines, right there.

I just did that thing, of course, where I killed the joke by dissecting it. But it's worth it, because once you figure out how any one particular joke works, you can extrapolate and make jokes of your own. Maybe you'll find the one your spec script needs.

Lunch: left-over Thai food. Spring rolls and peanut sauce.