Why the funniest jokes at the Edinburgh fringe just didn’t make me laugh | Zoe Williams

Delayed in transit with Mr Z, I was looking for a way to fill precisely one minute. I’d scoped out my responsibility in the crusade against boredom, and put it at 60 seconds, I can’t remember why. Anyway, I showed him this comedy routine by Ryan Goodcase, known as “ the 60-second countdown joke ” . I thought it was hilarious to the point of beauty when I first saw it, but immediately remembered why you should only pass comedy on, never supervise the watching of it, and definitely never describe it. (Although, for the benefit of those who can’t watch Goodcase’s routine, I will: it involves him asking an audience member to count down from 60 in their head and call out whatever number they’re at when asked to at various points in the gag.)

It will never be as funny as the first time you saw it; in standup especially, a joke is indivisible from its context. It has to walk the perilous line between funny and not-funny, so that part of the laughter is sheer relief that nobody died.

And if it’s a pun, it might look like it stands alone, but that’s when the context matters most of all. Probably the audience wasn’t laughing at the wordplay so much as at the audacity of doing wordplay in the first place, bowling around like it’s still 1952 and Bob Monkhouse never happened.

Related: Gay sheep and gaslighting: 10 of the funniest jokes from the Edinburgh fringe 2024

The funniest one-liners from this year’s Edinburgh festival are, as usual, almost all puns. I genuinely believe that they worked in the room, but on the page, it all reads like a mid-morning “For You” feed on X – post-Musk, after all the good people have left. It’s like trying to explain why the Beatles were good using their best nine notes. Discarding anything complicated, you’d end up somewhere pretty basic, like Love Me Do.

The “you had to be there” rule should be more carefully observed. At the very least, if you want to laugh at a thing, you have to watch it on YouTube.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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