Every Joke Has a Family: How to Stretch a Bit Into Prose and Keep the Laughs Coming (On Humor)
Humor columnist Karim Shamsi-Basha uses the family tree to show how one joke can grow into a monologue that keeps readers laughing.
In his 1895 essay "How to Tell a Story," Mark Twain wrote that the humorous story is an American art. It can be spun out as long as the teller likes, wander wherever it pleases, and "arrive nowhere in particular." The comic story, he said, is simply told.
True that!
I would add that the humorous story must also be raised, like a child, and it takes about as much patience.
Most of us write jokes the other way. We find one good line, fall in love with it, and then stand there holding it like a man at a wedding who does not know anyone there. A single joke is a snapshot. A story is a family album. The trick is getting from one to the other without padding. Every new line must either raise the laugh or tell the reader something they did not know. Preferably both.
I grew up in Damascus, where no one has a family tree. We have a family forest, and every branch has an opinion about your haircut.
That is one joke. Here are five ways to turn it into a monologue, using the only organizing principle I trust: relatives.
1. Siblings: Tag It Before It Leaves the Room
Siblings share the same parents. Tags share the same setup. They come right after the punch line, in the same room, and keep the laugh going without making the reader start over.
My mother had eight siblings. Dinner was not planned; it was zoned. The kitchen had traffic patterns. My grandmother directed them with a wooden spoon, which she used for stirring and for discipline. To this day, the smell of cumin makes me sit up straight.
Each tag carries new cargo: the zoning, the traffic, the spoon, the cumin. A tag that only repeats the premise is not a sibling. It is an echo, and echoes are not funny twice.
2. Cousins: Same Grandparents, Different House
Cousins share the DNA but live somewhere else. Take your premise to a new situation where the same logic still applies.
At an Arab wedding, the guest list is not a list. It is a census. Six hundred people, and every one of them knows your grades. The dabke line runs so long that the dancers at the front are in a different time zone than the ones at the back.
The premise, too many relatives, moved from the kitchen to the ballroom. The reader gets a tour of a culture, and the laugh travels with them. That is the informative part doing its job without wearing a name tag.
3. Second Cousins: The Callback
Second cousins are the relatives you see only at weddings and funerals, and somehow they remember everything about you. That is a callback. Plant a detail early, leave it alone, and bring it back after the reader has forgotten it.
At that wedding, my grandmother was 82 and moving slowly. She still had the wooden spoon. It was in her purse.
The callback works because the reader supplies half the joke. Recognition is its own laugh. Mind the spacing, though. Bring it back too soon and it is just a sibling. Wait too long and nobody at the funeral recognizes it.
4. Acquaintances: The Tangent That Finds Its Way Home
Acquaintances are the people you know from church or the gym. You share a setting, not a bloodline. This is the tangent, Twain's wandering: a digression that seems to abandon the premise, then circles back through a side door.
When I moved to Alabama, I assumed I would never again meet people so obsessed with who is kin to whom. Then a man at a meat-and-three asked me who my people were. I told him. He said he had a cousin who married a Lebanese fella in Birmingham, so we were practically family. Then he told me I needed a haircut.
The tangent earns its place because it informs (Southerners and Arabs keep the same genealogical ledger) and because it returns, landing back on the haircut from the opening. A tangent that never comes home is not a digression. It is a detour, and readers get out of the car during detours.
5. People the Joke Does Not Know: The Stranger at the Door
These are strangers, material from entirely outside the premise that walks in and rearranges the furniture. This is the reversal, the reveal, the thing the reader never saw coming but accepts immediately.
Last year I took one of those mail-in DNA tests. The results said I have a fourth cousin in Tuscaloosa. His name is Bubba. We have the same nose.
The stranger has to be a surprise, but a fair one. Bubba works because the whole piece has been about relatives, and he simply shows up from the wrong side of the forest. He also carries a fact: Those tests really do turn strangers into kin, with alarming frequency and very little warning.
The Takeaway: Build a Ladder
Stretching a joke is not about volume. It is about altitude. Arrange your punch lines like rungs on a ladder, each one a little higher than the last. Start with the small laughs, the tags. Climb through the cousins and the callbacks. Let the tangent give the reader a breather before the next step. Save your strongest line for the top, where it can pull together everything the reader has already met.
Readers will keep climbing as long as the rungs hold weight. Give them a fact, a laugh, or both on each step, and they will follow you to the top without looking down.
And when you get there, bring the whole family.
Bubba called last week. He is coming for Thanksgiving. He is bringing his mother's wooden spoon.
