Which is Funniest

You might wish to clarify who is driving.

As is, to me at least, any intended/supposed humour is lost by wondering who is speaking. The quotes don't really seem connected to the preceding paragraph and seem to me to be an attempt at humour after the event. I have an imagination, too, and don't need the scenario to be spelled out.

Play it again, Sam . . . er . . . Al

Sorry. Isolated quotes have as little humor as punchlines without the joke.

I guess #1, but I don't find any of them funny, nor the situation.

I feel sorry for the sick people, and if the illness is due to norovirus, then everyone else in that car should have refused to ride with the sick woman for fear of catching it too. Even if 'Mom' wanted to tough it out, someone else would have put their foot down out of sheer self-preservation.

I was also left wondering how anyone gets vomit on a windshield when they're inside the car. My first assumption was the vomit was on the outside of the windshield.

I realize now it was probably on the inside, but if I were reading this, I wouldn't necessarily pause long enough to make that connection correctly. Usually, the outside of the windshield is what catches nasty stuff, not the inside, and there's also the (incorrect) assumption that the material in question would be falling, not moving horizontally. Altogether, it adds up to me having the wrong layout pictured in my mind and being left wondering how that's possible.

1 definitely. It's quite snappy.
2 sounds a little cold, like X is scolding her
3 also sounds a bit judgemental.

Well first of all, the way I read it is, that the speaker is some person who had the unfortunate experience of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and was somehow victimized by the mom's sickness.

So, for punch line #1 I imagine the guy's mom staggering out of her car and vomiting on some guy's windshield. I think line number one works best out of the three.

That being said, I think vomit is too obvious a choice for the punch line. Its not horrible or wacky enough. The humor has to create a picture in the reader's mind of something happening that, while awful, is also unexpected, and more insane. Just throwing up on a windshield or out the window doesn't go far enough, as far as I'm concerned.

Think about the scene in Bridesmaids when a women in a wedding dress has food poisoning and is forced to relieve herself in the street. That is awful and funny on many levels.

It's not funny at all. Start afresh.

Bufty said:

It's not funny at all. Start afresh.

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That's opinion, though it reads as fact. I do agree with the posters saying it's impossible to know whether the punchline is funny without hearing the joke, however.

Each might be hilarious, or not funny at all. There's no way of knowing without reading the lead in.

If those are the choices, the first one.

Ugh, it does remind me of my brother-in-law's wedding though. It was a home wedding with a JP and all the family was there. My infant daughter began vomiting, then it ran through the family until everyone was running around trying to find something to throw up in. It was awful!

jjdebenedictis said:

. . .

I was also left wondering how anyone gets vomit on a windshield when they're inside the car. My first assumption was the vomit was on the outside of the windshield.

I realize now it was probably on the inside, but if I were reading this, I wouldn't necessarily pause long enough to make that connection correctly. Usually, the outside of the windshield is what catches nasty stuff, not the inside, and there's also the (incorrect) assumption that the material in question would be falling, not moving horizontally. Altogether, it adds up to me having the wrong layout pictured in my mind and being left wondering how that's possible.

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Never hung your head out the window and let fly while you were driving down the freeway, have you?

Jamesaritchie said:

Each might be hilarious, or not funny at all. There's no way of knowing without reading the lead in.

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I'd go with this, but I personally would refuse to ride home in a car with someone who felt norovirus coming on (though if mom was the last one in the group to get it, maybe everyone else was already on the mend), as it's the most contagious thing in the universe and stays in the environment for weeks or months after.

WriteMinded said:

Never hung your head out the window and let fly while you were driving down the freeway, have you?

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As someone who went on many a car trip as a kid and shared a backseat with her chronically carsick cousin, and who has been a designated driver for someone who was sick drunk a time or two, I can say that the aerodynamics make it form a sort of "racing stripe" down the side of one's own car, rather than flying back to hit the car behind.

Roxxsmom said:

As someone who went on many a car trip as a kid and shared a backseat with her chronically carsick cousin, and who has been a designated driver for someone who was sick drunk a time or two, I can say that the aerodynamics make it form a sort of "racing stripe" down the side of one's own car, rather than flying back to hit the car behind.

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That's the problem I had in picturing the incident. I assumed the cars had to both be stopped, at a stoplight, parked, whatever, but then the person vomiting would have to manage quite a distance horizontally. Are we meant to picture that the vomit landed on the windshield of the moving car behind? Because I'd be surprised if it worked like that.

If I have to pick, I'd go with the first, but it really doesn't do much for me. I'm assuming the lead-in is the paragraph above, and 1, 2 or 3 is substituted for the last line. Number 2 would be a distant second choice, because it's unclear what specifically happened. Number 3 doesn't work at all for me, because there's no clue what happened.

I think what makes it funny is the reader being able to figure out, from the final sentence, what specific unexpected incident took place. If the last sentence doesn't have enough clues (what monkey?) the reader can't do it. If the incident is too ordinary (she threw up on somebody's car), it lacks the comic payoff.

Personally, I find that the delivery leaves the humour totally flat. It's all reported in a very matter or fact, dry way that makes the tone seem rather humourless. And if that's the punchline, then reporting it like a quote from a newspaper article is not making it any funnier.

I'd try to get this anecdote across in a much more immediate way if you want the humour of it to shine through. Quirking up the language and tone to make the 'kookiness' come through would be a start.

I'm not sure any of them strike me as really funny, but all of them make me want to hear the story that leads up o the line. The third one, I think, makes me most curious.

#3 makes me curious because I want to know more about this monkey, but I didn't laugh at any of the options.

Incorporate the windshield wipers and you may have something.

Personally, I think the whole scenario might be more funny if instead of the info dump (which is what I assume is the previous paragraph which lead up to the 'funny line') were to be illustrated a little more in dialogue to help draw the humor out.

We're reading about a stubborn woman packing up in the middle of the night while she's sick as a dog and then this line is thrown at us from out of nowhere.

Personally, I think the entire thing would work better as a dialogue exchange to show it a little more, rather than throwing a wall of text at us and then jibbing us in the ribs and going 'ain't that funny yuk yuk yuk'.

Man, I'm surprised at the number of people who didn't read the lead in. Why comment if you're not sure what you're commenting on?

Anyways, I agree with the others. #1 I felt was best, but I was wondering who was driving. The packing etc made it seem like she was driving home herself to try to race the illness, but when I read the punchline I pictured a cab driver for some reason.

Ken said:

Incorporate the windshield wipers and you may have something.

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Ahh. Yes.

kenpochick said:

Man, I'm surprised at the number of people who didn't read the lead in. Why comment if you're not sure what you're commenting on?

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Because it wasn't really clear to begin with? It took me a few times reading through it to realize what I was reading.