Okay, I'll bite the bullet. I've got some one-liners for you all to tear to shreds. Feel free to tell me if they're any good or if not, why. Thanks.
They're all kept in the link above, to protect the innocent. All feedback welcome.
One Liners
Quite mixed some good, some not so good.
It may be easier to think about getting more of a system for how you structure them.
Some good stuff in there, as well as some very old ideas (plaice/place, the BA joke, riveting spring immediately to mind), you can probably get a few jokes out of that lot that could work in a stand up set.
I don't mean that to sound disparaging, my ratio of written jokes to jokes which make it into my set is probably something like 20:1, so keep writing and, most importantly, re-writing, quite a lot of those gags are nice ideas but they need pruning, try to take out any of the words that don't need to be there and get to the punch as quickly as you can.
Yup indeedy.
I looked at my 1000 joke file from 118 and I think maybe 30-40 were worth keeping.
And only 10 of those really were any good. A good joke comes really as a moment of magic inspiration. Hence why you have to write so many bad ones until your mojo starts working.
I kind of liked the bungalow one and the emphysema one, I can't say the rest were good but there was plenty of ideas in there that could bring results if reworked a bit.
I thought pretty much the same as Shandonbelle. I think looking at joke structures might help because a lot of these felt like you were just observing some homonyms.
Don't be deterred, keep posting them up.
Hi M Paterson,
I would pretty much agree with the above. Some nice ideas but, some of the jokes are a bit long winded i.e. the plaice/place joke could be:
My local fishmongers has recently closed down... Now I've no plaice to go.
or
I used to live in a fishmongers that burnt down... I've no plaice to call my own.
Something like that anyway. I'm no expert by any standard but, I would revisit some of the jokes and play around with them like Tony said (shorten them, try different ideas around the same theme etc). However, my best advice would be to test them on a live audience becuase like dominoes it's in the delivery. The immediate response/feddback will soon let you know whats working and whats not.
Good luck and keep up the good work.
Jason.
Woah, loads of replies. Sorry I've been busy writing sketches. Thanks for all the support and tips. I dump them all there from tweets I've made; it's somewhere to keep them - I should probably stick them in a word document too, and tinker with them, polish them up, like you all concur, brevity is key.
Also, just an aside, it's good to be back on the forums as I hadn't been on for many, many months. I'll not do that again.
Regards,
Marc.
I liked the Blackboard & the Indy one and a couple of others, but most need a tidy up. write loads more & go back to these later and see if they can be tweaked, shortened improved or dumped.
Hand to hand wombat