Tag Archives: Letterman

Joke About Squirrels and the Coronavirus

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The joke:

In New York City, there’s a new field hospital for coronavirus patients in Central Park. It has the squirrels so concerned that they’re rubbing Purell on their nuts.

How I wrote it:

This news item caught my eye because it had to do with Central Park. More on that later.

To write the joke I used my Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. One topic handle, “coronavirus,” has the association “Purell.” The other topic handle, “Central Park,” has the association “squirrels.”

My punch line links those two associations by stating that the squirrels are rubbing Purell on either their food or their genitals, depending on how you interpret the wordplay.

This joke is a tribute to the Central Park squirrel jokes that Dave Letterman often told in his “Late Show” monologue. This joke is typical: “It was so hot in Central Park today, I saw a squirrel rubbing sunblock on his nuts.”

For more of Dave’s squirrel jokes, here’s a short video of celebrities retelling some of them:

Part of the fun of Dave’s squirrel jokes is that “nuts,” in the context of the joke, can often only mean “genitals.” For example, nuts such as acorns don’t need sunblock no matter how hot it is.

But I like the fact that in my joke, the wordplay punch line really does have a double meaning. In this pandemic, people are not only rubbing Purell on parts of their body, but also on objects they touch frequently. So in the case of anthropomorphic squirrels, those objects could conceivably include the food they’ve gathered.

Joke About an Unsafe Toy

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The joke:

Today a watchdog group released its 2019 list of the toys deemed most unsafe for children. At the top of the list: Tickle Me Epstein.

How I wrote it:

This news item grabbed my interest because it reminded me of the prop pieces we used to do on Dave Letterman’s late-night shows. Writers would write jokes for a segment like “Dave’s Toy Shoppe” and then the prop department would actually build the “wacky props” and Dave would display them as he delivered the jokes. Prop pieces always got big laughs.

To write this joke I turned to my Punch Line Maker #2: Link the topic to pop culture. The handle of the topic is “unsafe toys,” so my first task was to think of someone or something in pop culture that would be unsafe in toy form.

Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had resurfaced in the news, because of his association with Prince Andrew. And Epstein was known for sexually abusing underage girls. So a Jeffrey Epstein toy would definitely qualify as unsafe.

To create a snappy name for the toy I thought of lots of real-life toys while keeping in mind what Epstein did, including his massages. Tickle Me Elmo came to mind.

Luckily for me, “Elmo” and “Epstein” both have two syllables and begin with “E.” So substituting one for the other to create the name of the toy results in wordplay that is tighter than it could be and therefore more surprising and funnier.

Of course, there’s nothing funny about sex abuse. But the joke works for most people because it doesn’t call to mind any graphic details of Epstein’s crimes.

Plus the joke is really about how some stupid company thinks it can convince people to buy an obviously bad product. And stupid companies make great targets for jokes.

How to Create a New Comedy/Talk Show

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You have a host. Your assignment is to build a new comedy/talk show around him or her. How do you even begin to do that?

Recently The New York Times went behind the scenes to give a glimpse into how James Corden and his staff are creating their version of Late Late Show, premiering on March 23, 2015.

And soon Stephen Colbert and his team will begin to shape a new Late Show, to debut on September 8, 2015.

New comedy/talk shows are also being created around Chelsea Handler, Grace Helbig, and other hosts.

The Caroline Rhea ShowI know what that process is like. I assisted in the birth of The Chevy Chase Show and The Caroline Rhea Show.

And I saw what worked and what didn’t work during my many years on the writing staffs of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Show with David Letterman.

So how would I go about creating a new comedy/talk show? I’d start by asking questions like these:

What is our host good at?

You want your show to have your host doing what they do best as often as possible. That way your host will have fun and perform at the top of their game, which means the audience will enjoy watching them.

James CordenTake James Corden. He’s a Tony Award-winning Broadway star, so his Late Late Show will probably have him performing many comedy scenes and songs. A clue that this is true: the Times article mentions that James hired writer David Javerbaum, with whom I worked on Late Show with David Letterman. In addition to his extensive experience in late night, D. J. is also an award-winning musical-theater lyricist and librettist.

What is our competition doing?

TV viewers crave familiarity but also freshness. Ideally your new show will offer viewers types of entertainment they’re not getting anywhere else in late night.

Stephen ColbertFor example, Stephen Colbert and his Late Show team may look at Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show and sense an opportunity to do more barbed comedy about politics, celebrities, and current events.

What is physically possible to produce week after week?

The time and money available to produce the show are limited so you can’t always do what you want.

Chevy Chase

That’s the way it was with Saturday Night Live alumnus Chevy Chase. He’s a gifted sketch performer, so ideally The Chevy Chase Show would have resembled SNL. But no late-night show has the writing budget, production resources, and rehearsal time to air even a half-hour of scripted sketches five nights a week.

How much time is our host willing to devote to the show?

Producing elaborate comedy pieces, like taped TV show parodies, takes up a lot of a host’s time. Producing comedy pieces like field pieces outside of regular business hours also takes a host’s time. If your host can’t or won’t put in that time, they’ll be limiting what comedy you can present on the show.

Jay LenoJay Leno could only perform a thirty-joke monologue on each episode of the Tonight Show because he devoted every free moment during the day, and several hours at night, to working on it.

Okay, fine, but what should we actually do on the show?

Use the answers to the above questions to create your new show by customizing the generic comedy/talk show template. In addition to your host, these are the elements of that generic template:

  • Sidekick
  • Other staffer-performers
  • Guests, including musical guests
  • Studio audience
  • Desk
  • Comedy pieces

3d2To tailor your comedy pieces to fit your new show and host, get my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. It’s a comprehensive manual of ways to pack a comedy/talk show with laughs:

  • cold openings and cold closes
  • the monologue
  • the main and second comedy pieces
  • guest segment extras
  • bumpers

Good luck to the new entrants in late-night!

How to Write a Desk Piece

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“Children grow up so fast these days. That’s the reasoning behind this latest addition to a beloved series of children’s books. It’s [HOLDS UP FAKE BOOK] Curious George and the hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room.”

Curious George and the hole in the wall of the girls' locker room

That’s an example of a joke in a Desk Piece, a type of short-form comedy that’s popular on many comedy/talk shows. A Desk Piece is a segment of fully-scripted comedy that the host performs by himself while sitting at his desk.

 

Here’s how I wrote that joke. The process was very similar to that of writing a topical monologue joke, a process I cover in detail in my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

 

I started with the topic of the Desk Piece. The topic is typically a collection of things in a particular category, in this case “New Books.” Next I brainstormed a long list of angles off that topic, that is, types of real books. Here’s a partial list of those angles:

 

stacks of bookscookbooks  *  dictionaries  *  puzzle books  * coffee table books  *  The Lord of the Rings  *   thesauruses  *  novels  *  atlases  *  children’s books  *  Mark Twain  * celebrity memoirs  *  paperbacks  *   etiquette books  *  Curious George  *  biographies  *  encyclopedias  *  guidebooks  *  pop-up books  *  how-to books  *  photography books  *  manuals

 

To create the punch line I chose one angle–Curious George–and used my Punch Line Maker #3 on it, asking the question “What might a curious person do?” I answered that question using a surprisingly unwholesome association of “curious,” which is “spy on people.”

 

Finally I used my Joke Maximizer #9 (“Get specific”), devising a very specific Peeping George scenario, and arrived at the punch line: “Curious George and the hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room.”

3d2

“New Books” is what I call a Graphic/Prop Piece, one of the seven types of Desk Pieces I analyze in my own new book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

 

A footnote: I wrote that Curious George joke for Late Show with David Letterman in May 1998 but you’d never know it. It’s an example of evergreen comedy, comedy that has a long shelf life, usually because it’s not based on something topical but on a more lasting pop culture phenomenon.

 

If you’re preparing a writing sample to submit to a comedy/talk show, include a generous portion of evergreen comedy. That way your submission won’t seem too dated if it winds up sitting on the credenza of some head writer for months before it’s read.