Adapted and excerpted from Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense by Elliott Kalan. © 2025 by Elliott Kalan. Published by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Often on a quiet evening, as I sit enjoying a book, I will come across a joke I find so funny that I simply have to share it with my wife. She’s usually reading her own book, not wanting to be disturbed in order to hear an out-of-context joke from a book that, if she’d wanted to read it, she would already be reading. But even worse than bothering my wife (who knew being bothered by me was part of the deal when we got married), I’m bothering the delicate relationship that’s supposed to exist between a reader and a joke that isn’t meant to be heard but read.
Writing a joke purely to be read is, in some ways, the purest test of joke writing. A prose joke is meant to be experienced alone, without the emotional emphasis of a joke teller’s vocal performance or visual cues to assist in communicating its meaning. It doesn’t even have multiple audience members peer-pressuring each other into laughing. No, this laugh must be pulled from a lone, quiet reader.