Thursday, September 20, 2007

Hahaha... Wait, what?

The RunAway Joke of the Day. If you don't get it, then you're probably brain dead!

The Joke of the Day has been airing for quite a while now so I thought some of you might be curious about the process. As you probably assumed, it is, in fact, much akin to rocket science. Here we go.

Let me preface this by giving props* to Chuck for coming up with the idea. It was as simple as this: let's tell a joke once a day, air it daily at a certain time, and see what happens. Originally, it wasn't our intent to only tell terrible, terrible jokes. But we did want to get lots of our friends from around the workplace to come and tell a joke on camera, and in case they didn't have anything good, we decided to fill a fishbowl with some easy two-liners.

Well, that sort of backfired and everybody was just too lazy to attempt an actual GOOD joke. Also, we realized that short-and-quick worked better on the internet than a long preamble leading up to a punchline.

These terrible jokes we were telling in and of themselves are not funny. So, to make up for that we do one of two things, or sometimes both:

  1. Present the joke in some wacky manner, like reading it in languages nobody understands, and never interpreting it, OR...
  2. After the punchline, we jump into some random, irrational action, like somebody running up with a Polaroid to snap a picture, or simply eating the joke.
These two strategies are more than sufficient to get even the grumpiest person to kind of half-chuckle, or perhaps open their mouths slightly, like a smile in its fetal stage. And if either of those things happen, we've more than met our mark of being "mildly amusing".

As for some other "behind-the-scenes" info, you should know that some of the stuff is improvised, some of the stuff is planned just before the joke is performed, and absolutely none of it is planned anywhere outside the window of a minute and a half before the camera rolls. It's quite the process.


Oh, and, in case you're wondering... Those arms coming from off-camera with the joke jar? Yeah, that's usually me. We try not to put my face in things if we don't have to.


*Yeah, I give props like it's 1998.

BELOW: Chuck tempts Danila with another stunningly bad Joke of the Day!

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