Tag Archives: Tonight Show

How to Write a Funny Caption

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Say you want to write a funny caption for this cartoon, which was the subject of Caption Contest #447 in The New Yorker.

New Yorker contest

You write funny captions for uncaptioned cartoons the same way you’d write jokes about a Found Photo, which is an unaltered photo that wasn’t originally intended to be funny. Examples of Found Photos are the animal photos on the website I Can Has Cheezburger?…

I Can Has Cheezburger? photo of puppy

…and the athletes’ headshots in the comedy piece “Superlatives” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Athlete headshot from "Superlatives" on "Tonight Show"

Follow these steps to write a funny caption for a cartoon, photo, or other picture:

A) Briefly describe the scene in the picture using its handles. The handles are the one or two most distinctive people or things in the picture and the action that those people or things are performing. This descriptive sentence will bridge the visual picture and a verbal punch line, i.e., the funny caption.

In the case of the New Yorker contest cartoon, the descriptive sentence would be something like, “A guy’s pets have psychotherapy.”

B) Use that descriptive sentence and the Punch Line Makers to create a funny caption. The Punch Line Makers are the six proven techniques for creating punch lines that I cover in my book Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

In the case of the New Yorker contest cartoon, the winning writer, Alonso Cisneros, apparently used Punch Line Maker #1: Link two associations of the topic. Here’s how he went about it.

The topic—the descriptive sentence—is “A guy’s pets have psychotherapy.”

New Yorker contestBrainstorming on the handle “pets” produces associations like “hair on the furniture,” “shelter animal,” “adoption,” “cat food,” “veterinarian,” “do tricks,” and “leash laws.”

Brainstorming on the handle “psychotherapy” yields associations like “depression,” “fifty-minute hour,” “my parents hate me,” “childhood trauma,” “I was adopted,” “couch,” and “Freud.”

At least one association, the one involving adoption, appears in similar form on both lists. Linking those two associations results in the winning caption:

“My pets found out they were adopted.”

C) Edit the caption using the Joke Maximizers. The Joke Maximizers are twelve tools for editing jokes to make them as funny as possible; I list them in my book. The writer of the winning caption used these Punch Line Makers:

Punch Line Maker #1: Shorten as much as possible. The caption doesn’t have any unnecessary words or syllables.

Punch Line Maker #2: End on the laugh trigger. The most surprising word in the caption—“adopted”—is at the very end.

Punch Line Maker #4: Make everything clear. Every word in the caption is simple. Not only that, the words “my pets” make it clear that the man on the couch is talking. That’s important because it’s not immediately clear from the drawing itself which human or animal is talking, if any.

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The Hugh Grant Fallacy

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Hugh Grant's mug shotThis week, on June 18, Access Hollywood perpetuated a longstanding misconception about The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. A voiceover referred to “the game changer, when in 1995 Hugh Grant came on shortly after his dalliance with a prostitute. Jay beat Letterman in the ratings that night and stayed number one for nineteen years.”


 

Game-changer? So Hugh Grant’s appearance on Tonight was solely responsible for the show’s ratings dominance for almost two decades? Ridiculous. Cast of NBC's "ER"

In fact, the night Grant appeared (July 10, 1995) wasn’t even the first night that Tonight topped Late Show in the ratings. By that time Tonight had been routinely beating Late Show every single Thursday night for months thanks to the huge lead-in provided by the hit show ER. And many weeks the ratings gap between Tonight and Late Show was only a tenth of a point.

 

 

Hugh Grant with Jay LenoSo why do the media keep trotting out Hugh Grant? Because he makes for a fun, easy-to-follow story: “Ain’t life crazy? The only reason Jay got to number one is because some dumb Hollywood actor got caught with a hooker.” And Grant did play a role in a ratings milestone: the week he appeared on Tonight was the first week that the show beat Late Show when measured over an entire week of head-to-head original episodes. But Tonight won three nights that week, not just the night that Grant guested.

 

The truth is, Access Hollywood, that no one single “game changer” led to Tonight taking the late-night crown from Late Show. Many factors changed the game. I describe one of those factors in my post “When O. J. Simpson Killed, So Did Jay Leno.” For more, read my book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.The book "Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV"

When O. J. Simpson Killed, So Did Jay Leno

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As a host of the Tonight show, Jay Leno was typically regarded by the media as dull, not edgy. For example, a February 2014 article by Daniel D’Addario on the website Salon bears the headlines: “Jay Leno thrived by being America’s dullest man. With less edge than David Letterman or Conan O’Brien, Leno was the perfect host for one of the last huge franchises.”

Jay Leno

I never understood that “dull” assessment of Jay. One reason is that the main job of the host of the Tonight show is to keep the show number one in the timeslot. And that means appealing to as many American television viewers as possible. And that means performing comedy that most viewers want to watch, comedy that most viewers find interesting, the opposite of dull. A Tonight show host who most viewers actually found dull would soon be out of a job. And Jay realized that. So he put on a show that, as the ratings prove, wasn’t dull. Year after year, it attracted the most viewers. Jay did his job.

I also never understood how the media could claim that Jay wasn’t “edgy.” Jay did a lot of risky comedy. For example, back in 1994 and 1995 he and his writers (myself included) regularly mined a grisly double homicide for jokes. I’m referring, of course, to the O. J. Simpson murder case.

The Dancing Itos on the "Tonight" show

Think about that. Every night for months Jay invited the audience to laugh about aspects of a tragic, bloody act of butchery. Does that mean that Jay was “America’s dullest man”? Not when one of the Tonight show’s signature bits, the Dancing Itos, lookalikes for the trial’s Judge Ito, made it into People magazine. Does it mean that Jay had “less edge” than the other late-night hosts? Not when Jay was the only one of them routinely wading into the dark and treacherous waters of homicide humor.

Jay’s show even included several parody videos that treated the O.J. murder trial as a sitcom. See one here, followed by a look at the Dancing Itos in action.

The fact is, the O.J. comedy on the Tonight show killed, in the “got huge laughs” sense of the word. It killed because it was edgy and the late-night audience at the time craved edgy. Jay gave most late-night viewers what they wanted to see.  Jay did his job.

And now O. J. Simpson is back in the news because this week is the 20th anniversary of that heinous crime, the prelude to The Trial of the Century. So, for old times’ sake, I wrote this new O.J. joke:

A grinning and overweight O. J. Simpson in court

“According to a friend, O.J. Simpson has gained a lot of weight in prison. The good news is O. J. finally found the real killer…and ate him.”

That was the job.

For more on how the Tonight show handled O. J. comedy, read my new book, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV.

Comedy Writing Is Not Rocket Science

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If you know the techniques, tricks, and rules, comedy writing isn’t as hard as it looks. When I was co-head writer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno I directed a sketch featuring Jay and astronaut Story Musgrave. The sketch was a comedy tour of Space Center Houston, the official visitor center of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. (In the photo, that’s Story in the NASA jumpsuit and me with the microphone boom on my face.)Joe Toplyn with Jay Leno and astronaut Story Musgrave at Space Center Houston, February 19, 1995. We finished taping around lunchtime and I found myself in the cafeteria with Story. As a kid I wanted to be an astronaut so I was thrilled when he invited me to bring my plastic tray over and join him. What a gracious, smart, impressive guy. We chatted about the taping and then he observed, “It must be really hard to come up with comedy every night, week after week.”

This STS-61 crew portrait includes astronauts (top row, l to r) Richard O. Covey, Jeffrey A. Hoffman, and Thomas D. Akers and (bottom row, l to r) Kenneth D. Bowersox, Kathryn C. Thornton, F. Story Musgrave, and Claude Nicollier.

Story Musgrave and part of the team that repaired the Hubble Space Telescope

I was almost struck speechless. Here was an astronaut, a crew member on one of the most complex missions in the history of the Space Shuttle, a veteran spacewalker who had helped repair the incredibly intricate Hubble Space Telescope so scientists could use it to unravel the secrets of the universe. Here was this guy telling me that my job seemed hard. I replied to Story that my job had to be much easier than his. I pointed out that, as with any job, you get better at comedy writing the more you do it, and I had been doing it for years. And I explained that a show like Tonight has a large staff of writers so even if a few of them are off their game on any given day there are plenty of others around who can pick up the slack. But years later I realized that part of the reason comedy writing seems so difficult to Story, and to so many other people, is that the process is so mysterious. To me, repairing the Hubble Space Telescope seems mind-bendingly difficult because I have absolutely no idea how I would go about doing it. To Story, the same task is relatively easy because he knows all the steps involved and has practiced them over and over.

Joe Toplyn and other writers of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" in Las Vegas, November 1995.

Joe Toplyn and part of the team that wrote “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno”

The process of writing comedy was a little mysterious to me, too, until recently. I had created thousands of jokes and bits for the four late-night comedy/talk shows I’ve worked on but at the time I didn’t completely understand how I was doing it. The idea of understanding how, and of setting down the techniques, tricks, and rules for creating short-form comedy, began to appeal to me. I thought writers could use a book that would help them unravel the secrets of the comedy universe. So I wrote Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. Story, if you ever read the book you’ll understand better than ever why I said comedy writing is way easier than your job.