Peel

theoffcamerashow with Sam Jones has a video called "Ray Romano Reveals the Construction of a Joke" in which Romano and Jones attempt to disentangle how a joke goes from inspiration to ideation, to drafting, to stage. What we get is Romano describing how a poet finds the poem.

In regards to what a joke is, Romano says, "the closest thing is...it's like music. It’s music. Why doesn't this note follow that one? Why is this melodic and that isn't?" On crafting a joke he says, "I just say it out loud. and saying it wrong, saying it lame five times." 

This is how poets describe the relationship to their crafting process: affectively. Romano's comparison to composing music, his concern of performance and oration, and discovering the harmony between the mariel and the inspiration reads like Rilke jerking off to a buzzfeed listical of his own inspirational quotes. 

...

Ray Romano Explains a Joke

"what works for me is my Son 

calls me up and he ran

out of gas on the highway,

on the 101, 

and he's very 

la dee dah 

about it, and I'm,

like,

panicking. 'Joe,

what's the traffic like?' 

And he says, 'behind me

it's bad 

but it's moving in front of me.'"

…

When I pull the extra sinew clung to the clementine’s inner flesh, I see the animal of it. The alive it once was. Similarly, the thought experiment “The Ship of Theseus” wonders, if you were to strip every plank of wood from a ship and immediately replace every plank with an identical plank in the exact same spot, would it be the same ship? Essentially?

Like everything I ever talk about, The Ship of Theseus has no point and is annoying. It’s only contribution is in its question: what are...an...ything...s? And also, its contribution is in the pulling apart itself. The undoing, the tearing, the brutal. That is the essay. That’s what we’re here for. We don’t read to be convinced. We read to rip and skin and unravel and never, try as we might, end holding one perfectly together piece.

 This is my problem with “proof”. I don't think you go about proving anything by trying to control it; by making it’s tiny hand grab the shopping cart, barking “stay”. What’s to be proven? What answers can be found with papers and rinds and empty coffee cups strewn around my one bedroom?

When I pull it all apart, is it ever still a poem, a joke? Where’s the funny I’ve been hearing about?

p. 3/5