Updating Clichés - I've never seen that before
The currency of most joke structure involves re-interpreting cliché. By cliché I mean any well-known phrase or saying - Song titles, graffiti, advertising slogans, news headlines, quotations. In fact many clichés are already re-interpretations of previous clichés.
On a simplistic level you can select a few current clichés, change the wording slightly to mean something different, then work backwards and create a set of jokes. Listening to some comedians, it's what I assume they must do; and it shows - the subject matter is arbitrary and the joke structure is obvious and eventually monotonous. Given a space cadet attitude with timing to match - it can pass for an act. But it's joke writing by numbers.
Most cliches, are more than familiar phrases in neutral short-hand, they also express received ideas, popular myths and stereotypical thinking as well as long-standing truths. Clichés can therefore degrade and corrupt with time. 'Sound as a pound' 'Safe as houses' 'Plenty more fish in the sea'.
Every day we wake up in a world informed by yesterday; our language and ideas encapsulated in cliché, reinforce the habitual thinking of yesterday. Fashions pass, the tenets of science are subject to re-appraisal; even what were once understood to be universal truths are periodically over-turned and pass in to history.
Comedy that accepts the dubious cliché as a given, must be bunged in the recyc. The dumb blonde and the thick paddy are obvious examples of yesterday's slack, but every other sentence we utter, may contain clichés that reinforce lies and stereotypes that can translate into potential pain for some of us. The job of the artist and of the comedian is to challenge, confront and expose the redundant clichés of yesterday.
Start a new heading in your notebook - 'I've never seen that before" and start to record events, behaviour and phenomena you haven't previously experienced. It's a way of identifying fresh subject matter and more importantly describing the world we live in today and not the world of yesterday evidenced by redundant clichés.