Line 'em up

Setup. Punchline. What more do you want? One-liners are the essence of comedy, eliciting a big emotional response from as little emotional engagement as possible.

One-liner comics don’t pretend to care where you come from or what you do for a living. No alternative viewpoints will be considered, they won’t “share” anything about themselves and they’ll only stray from the abstract if there’s a topical reason for doing so. If you don’t laugh, it’s going to be extremely awkward for everyone, because the joke is paramount, the joke is everything, the joke is more or less all they’ve got.

Tim Vine didn’t perform at the 2006 Fringe but managed to widely amuse with a giant billboard on the Cowgate proclaiming he was “not appearing at this festival”. Tony Cowards, likewise, will not be physically present in Edinburgh this year but posting 140-character jokes via Twitter from his home in England. The performance aspect of one-liners can be decidedly minimal, but such an approach carries a big risk.

“One-liners are death or glory,” maintains Gary Delaney, a standup circuit veteran but Fringe debutant who specialises in darker material. “If an audience isn’t responding, frankly, you’re fucked. There’s not much you can do, there’s no plan B. You could put on a top hat and do a song and dance number, but what’s the point? You can tweak it a bit, there are certain bits you can drop in or out and you can alter the pace. But you can’t fundamentally change the nature of what you do, which is jokes.”

With his sporadic songs, silly props and love of puns, Vine’s persona is recognisably daft, yet it’s every bit as calculated as a more deadpan performer like Delaney.

“You need to have a certain amount of front,” he explains. “The last thing I should do is appear apologetic when I’m telling my stuff, so I probably go to the other end of the scale and look like I’m enjoying it more than anyone possibly could be. Even if I’m dying horribly, I tend to crank it up and give ‘em even more of what they don’t want!”

For legendary US comic Emo Phillips, “one-liners are perfect for the way my mind works. I think extremely short-term. I have a ‘sprinter’ brain.”

It’s a process that never stops. He elaborates: “From the time I wake up in the afternoon, to when I finally fall asleep in the morning, I am always thinking of jokes. Or at least set-ups. My gosh... I am a monster. Stop me before I elicit mirth again!”

Few audiences can endure a whole hour of one-liners without some additional set-pieces, such as Vine’s celebrated 'Pen Behind The Ear' trick, to break up the relentless gag barrage. Still, an accomplished one-liner merchant offers more laughs-per-minute than any other form of comedy. And the response they provoke is both immediate and lacking in affectation.

As a result perhaps, the men who perform one-liners (and they are invariably men, rare exceptions like Shelagh Martin notwithstanding) tend to be among the most passionate, perfectionist and snobbish of all comics about comedy.

Delaney repeatedly chides himself for being too “militant” as he disparages those Fringe shows that prioritise educating an audience over making them laugh; Vine audibly shudders contemplating “a confessional style? Imagine that, Vine spills his guts ...” And Philips speaks for them all when he contemplates “a theatrical one-man show. I’ve often thought of doing one. But then the laziness passes.”

Yet this precise, analytical breed are amongst the least inclined to describe their performances as art.

Cautiously, Delaney ventures that “One-liners aren’t art because there are a number of processes that you can apply – you think about things and twist them about in different ways. You’re looking at words like an engineering problem.”

Despite appearing in countless volumes of wit and joke books, Phillips is “grateful great gags don't command respect... otherwise I'd be competing with joke writers whose parents had sent them to prestigious universities to get advanced degrees in it.”

Certainly, the comic is never the ultimate authority on what’s funny, and even stand-ups as established as these have found themselves totally baffled during their diligent rounds of preview shows. “You always get pleasantly surprised and unpleasantly shocked in equal measure,” admits Vine.

According to Delaney, “comics only suggest, audiences decide. Whenever I go along to a new material night and try out 20 or 30 jokes, I don’t think I could pick out much better than random which ones will work.”

Phillips recalls: “I remember this distinctly, though it happened 26 years ago. One afternoon, while taking a stroll, I thought of two jokes. I had absolutely no idea which was better. That evening, I tried them both out. One killed; in fact, it was so strong that I was thereafter able to open every show with it. The other joke elicited a silence otherwise achievable only in space shuttle experiments.”

It ought to be remarked that, while the hoariest one-liners remain the detritus of awful Christmas crackers, the genre is otherwise in rude health. The proliferation of the internet has made the dissemination of great jokes easier, regrettably leading to widespread instances of plagiarism. It’s a nuisance and financial impairment that’s been experienced by Phillips, Delaney and Vine to varying degrees, though the latter perhaps deserves the greatest sympathy for being inadvertently ripped off by a dead man. When scores of his gags were mistakenly attributed to the late, great Tommy Cooper in a mass-circulated email, Vine had to defend himself against claims he was a thief simply for performing his own material.

At the same time, a series of lucrative joke competitions, such as the one conducted by the Dave Channel at last year’s Fringe, won by Dan Antopolski’s "Hedgehogs – why can't they just share the hedge?", have sprung up. Comics like Delaney have significantly boosted their profile through showcasing their wit on Twitter, while demand for jobbing one-liner merchants to write for television, radio and other standups continues.

Meanwhile, Delaney can exploit Edinburgh’s comedy-savvy audiences to unveil his grimmest, most potentially offensive gags; Vine, his most gloriously groanworthy, while for Phillips the Fringe affords the opportunity to “extend to my stalkers, the courtesy of being in the exact same place for almost an entire month”.