Opinion: Dot.Comedy – Telling Jokes In Cyberspace

Phil Swales

I first started writing jokes about a year ago.

Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, I already had a captive audience of about a hundred people on which to try out my material.  However, my initial attempts at humour weren’t very good.  In fact, some of them were just plain terrible. For some reason, being on the receiving end of a bad joke brings out the worst in people.  A good joke would earn me a couple of ‘likes’ or retweets.  A bad one would have at least half a dozen people commenting on it with an air of vitriol normally reserved for genocidal dictators – and these were my friends and family.

It got so bad that I contemplated giving up writing gags altogether.  I think I actually did, for a while.  Then I started again.  Slowly but surely, my jokes got better, the insults reduced and the compliments increased.  After about six months my hit rate was so high that I decided to try stand-up comedy.  I wrote a set containing the best of my cyberspace one-liners, plus a few more that were untested anywhere.

My stand-up debut was good enough to encourage me to keep performing and keep writing new jokes, and everything went swimmingly for a while.  I even won the runner-up prize twice in a weekly Twitter joke competition.  But then, things changed again.  I tried experimenting with my style.  I tried out darker material.  A paedophile joke on Twitter saw me lose several followers and gain one outburst of outrage by another follower, who then immediately left, never to return.  An Anne Frank joke on Facebook earned me criticism from somebody with far more experience than I, who accused me of making light of a terrible chapter in history.  Well, Holocaust jokes certainly aren’t for everyone, but they didn’t seem to do Mel Brooks’ career much harm.

Admittedly, these were weak gags, and in hindsight I probably shouldn’t have posted them.  But writers should be allowed to fail, and given the choice, I’d rather fail in cyberspace to about a hundred ‘friends’ then in a room of a hundred strangers.  Truth be told, I didn’t feel comfortable telling the dark material, but I didn’t know that until I tried.

After a year of trying out my material in the social network, I feel confident enough to know when a joke works or not – for the most part.  As tempting as it to post up a joke as soon as it pops into my head and get instant feedback, it also slightly devalues the gag and leaves the writer open to plagiarism.  Instead, I’m going to spend more time and effort crafting each joke, and keep them for the stage and not the screen. I’m also going to stick to jokes that are more in keeping with my own personality.

Social network sites can be useful for would-be comedians, but they’re not without their pitfalls.  Writer beware.