Here’s a pretty good street joke1 that I recently heard, about the whole Tiger Woods circus:
What’s the difference between a car and a golf ball?
Tiger Woods can drive a golf ball 400 yards.
Funny stuff. Like most topical humor it’ll have a pretty short shelf life, but it should be funny for at least a week or two.
Whenever someone hears that I do comedy, they often like to tell me one (or more) of their favorite jokes. It’s a fun little side benefit of doing stand-up. The season finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm captured this dynamic perfectly, when Funkhauser cornered Jerry Seinfeld at the Seinfeld Reunion taping to tell him a joke.
There’s sometimes an awkward moment afterward, especially if I laugh at the joke. They’ll say, “You should use that in your act!” Well, thanks, but no. Even if the joke made me cry with laughter, stand-up comedy is about performing original material, not telling a series of jokes you’ve heard from friends or read on the Internet. But thanks for the laugh!
- A street joke is a regular joke that you hear “on the street” (or, these days, on the Internet), and not original to the person telling it. For more comedy terms, see the stand-up comedy glossary. [↩]
You ever have friends or family try to give you original material topics?
That’s the worrrrstt. Once a week I get a call “You’ll never guess what happened. My wife, took her CD player to the gym. haha!!! omgz! Who still has a CD player, hunnie. Why didn’t you just pull our your 8 track player. Ya know? You should use that sometime.”
uhhh… elevator.
Andrew J Rivers
December 2nd, 2009
Haha… yeah. Everyone is also apparently just CONVINCED that their job provides the most hilarious material in history. “Oh my God, listen to this story…. you should use that!!”
Yeah…. no.
CJ
December 2nd, 2009