Dollar Dollar Bills
Let’s say you are gifted $10,000. Hell yeah, right? While not a life-changing sum of money, it’s still something to smile about. But even if the sum were higher or lower, how the news is delivered could turn a “hell yeah” into a story and memory you have forever.
I don’t actually know what Publisher’s Clearing House is, but I remember their commercials in the 90s. They’d take their white Dodge Caravan full of balloons and a huge check and surprise people on their doorsteps with lots of money. I used to think about that all the time as a kid—how badly I wished that van would roll up to our house.
A grand delivery like that makes the experience much more enjoyable and memorable. It’s also by the same logic that people lose their minds for free shirts thrown into the stands at sporting events.
A free shirt sent to you in the mail?
A free shirt launched from a cannon and delivered to you, specifically, out of the thousands of others around you, through the air?
3 Normal Stories Made Funny By Good Delivery
Stand-up comedy is funny because it’s relatable (which is also why we like stories). A comic’s skill lies in delivering relatable experiences, thoughts, and emotions through a humorous lens.
In story, the more contrast there is between where you start and where you go, the better. And in comedy, one way to use that technique is by bringing the contrast front and center with the delivery. That could be done any number of ways, but a couple common examples are removing emotion from your voice while speaking about something normally filled with emotion or setting up one idea only to pull the rug out from under it, revealing something more humorous.
Below are three examples of stand-up comedians using their delivery and some storytelling techniques to turn normal things into memorable jokes.
If you are unfamiliar with any of these bits, I am requiring you to watch them before reading because it’s all about the delivery. Words on a page can never do a comic’s delivery justice.
Mitch Hedberg: A bad neighbor
We’ll start things off with a short story. Another way to describe the basic descend-and-return structure of story is descending from order to chaos. One of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes hinges on this descent.
Things start off pretty normal
I had an apartment, and I had a neighbor, and whenever he would knock on my wall, I knew he wanted me to turn my music down.
A neighbor banging on your wall because your music is too loud: expected, not funny.
And that made me angry because I like loud music. So when he knocked on the wall, I’d mess with his head.
Then Hedberg takes the story, descends into chaos, and delivers it like it’s completely normal.
I’d say: “Go around. I cannot open the wall. I don’t know if you have a doorknob on the other side, but over here there’s nothing.”
Simple. And what’s more, somehow even if we have been the person upset by our neighbor playing loud music, we laugh along.
Nate Bargatze: A dead horse
Driving past a dead horse is not funny. You’ve likely driven past dozens of dead animals in your lifetime.
So me and my buddy, he rented a car. He’s driving. On the way out there [Mount Rainier], I see a dead horse just laid out in this guy’s yard.
But then, similar to the structure of Hedberg’s story, Bargatze uses a bit of chaos to play out the hypothetical story with no real hint of any emotion.
I was like, man, I bet you don’t think about that when you buy a horse—it dying. You know, what do you do? That’s a huge thing dying in your yard. You can’t just scoot it off into the woods with your foot and try to get another one that matches before the kids come home.
He continues his train of thought with story after hypothetically chaotic story about what it would take to move a dead horse. Then, once he’s exhausted all his horse jokes, he moves on into a story of his trip to Mount Rainier. He kills it with a couple minutes of quality Rainier jokes, but then he brings us all back.
We come back down. And we’re driving back.
And this is where we realize there wasn’t a period at the end of the horse story. It was an ellipsis.
Since my buddy was driving, he didn’t see the dead horse, you know? And I’m like, well you can’t not see it.
We get to it. I was like, “it’s right here.” and I pointed, and the horse was standing up, doing unbelievable. One of the healthier horses that I’ve ever seen. So I learned that horses lay down to sleep.
And this is where I hesitate to even write the text on the screen because it’s all about his delivery here. Just perfect.
There are more jokes that follow about how horses lay down, but you get the point. Bargatze could have told the whole second part of his story before the bit about Mount Rainier. It would have worked fine. But delivering the story the way he experienced it—like when you have a bunch of pizza for a party and have leftovers but then forget you have leftovers until you go back to the fridge the next day—made it all the better.
Demetri Martin: A single line
This one is a bit different than the other two, and I don’t think it makes sense to do a line-by-line breakdown. The stories Martin tells here are really just pieces of stories. However, it’s his delivery that makes them all work. You never imagine how drastically different a simple line can change an image—and the story an image tells. Again, the contrast between what you think it is and what it becomes makes the experience that much better.
I know this is technically sit-down comedy, but he does it in his stand-up routines, too. Please no hate mail.
Quote of the Week
I’m going to bring it back to Mitch Hedberg for this week’s quote. His strength is easily his one-liners.
I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.
Thanks for reading.
Braden