alt Hacker NewsThe jokes in the article are just there to demonstrate the pattern. There are lots of more sophisticated jokes which clearly follow the same pattern. For example Milton Jones' classic (which won "best joke" at the edinburgh comedy festival I believe)
I come from a long line of police marksmen. Apart from my grandfather, who was a bank robber. But he died recently..... surrounded by his family.
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But this is not truly funny comedy. These seem quite clearly made up and depend on this very specific scenario. I think truly funny jokes are ones that are plausible real life scenarios, that spot some sort of unexpected social circumstance or a phenomena with a clever take or perspective that people do not frequently consider and that many in the audience can relate with. Usually you would expect it to be something that actually happened or could have happened to the comedy teller, and you want to imagine them actually be in that situation. Or it can also be a common real life scenario, but an original, yet clever insightful take on it combined with the character of the teller.
I came from a long line of police marksmen. They serve good coffee next to the shooting range.
The ten best-voted one-liners from this year's Fringe are listed here:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/aug/19/mark-s...
A couple follow that pattern exactly, but some also bank on taking words literally for comic effect.
> I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it. (Mark Simmons)