If you’re going to forget something, presumably there must be a time when you know it and a time when it’s gone from your head. Surely there must, then, be one day in which this change happens.

I think it’s today.

For I heard a joke a few months ago and I can still remember it, but for the all the chocolate in the world, I could not now tell you the name of the comedian.

Which is of course usually a bad thing, and especially as this means I’m about to rip him off. (I do remember it was a he.) But in this case, I want to give you a bad review of a good joke. For cause.

Follow. Here’s the joke.

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

Okay, so, not earth-shattering, but it’s a good line, it’s a good joke. Except it isn’t. Because as delivered by this comedian, the joke actually went on further: “I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came. Or did he? Was the bell broken?”

Destroyed.

A nice laugh, eradicated by the follow-up.

It is insulting to presume your audience won’t understand something, but there’s also something here about surfacing the work. You don’t show your working out, you don’t show your various drafts, you present the writing, the finished writing. And in this case, the comedian laid bare his thinking. Not enough people will get this joke, he thought, so he’d best explain it and that way everyone will get it.

Yes, certainly, that’s true. Not everyone will get the joke as it stands and if you add in an explanation, there is not one single person who will fail to grasp the gag.

But I offer that there is also now no one whatsoever who will find it funny anymore.

The comedian thinks the choice is between a few people laughing and a lot of people laughing, but it is not. The choice is really between a few people laughing and nobody. A joke is a precious and difficult piece of writing, a prize and a delicacy, and it can be shot to hell if you don’t shut up at the right point.

I heard the comedian tell this joke, I laughed, then he did the follow-up exposition and the laugh rather died in my throat. I was left feeling a bit embarrassed to be even smiling at something that was now deeply obvious instead of surprising, that was now newspaper-headline-plain instead of leaving you just the tiniest thing to work out for yourself.

But the reason this is back in my head this week is that last weekend, I heard another comedian do a joke that was a similar format. It was another one-liner, it depended on you realising what he wasn’t saying, and it was a good gag. And he did not explain it afterwards.

He did something worse.

He waited a beat and then said to the audience, “take your time.”

I stopped watching.

It was obviously that I didn’t enjoy being patronised, but also if you’re really going to give me time to grasp a joke, it had better be a bit better than this. That’s why I stopped: the patronising tone, yes, but also the instant awareness of cockiness, that this was what he thought was brilliant material. Patronising me about my ability to comprehend something –

– wait, I’ve just realised, right now, talking to you, that I cannot remember what the joke was. It was only six days ago and it wasn’t good enough to stick in my head.

Okay, so patronising is rarely a sought after commodity, but in this case it did so much damage in so many ways. It wrecked the joke, of course, but it also put a spotlight on the relationship between this comic and his audience. He seemed to feel superior, yet the joke just wasn’t remotely good enough to support that.

And then since it therefore shone out from him that he thought this was brilliant material, that also told me there was nothing in the rest of his set to stick around for.

Well.

Listen, if we’re going to be made to think about the working-out of a joke, let’s do it usefully, let’s do it together. Take that first joke again:

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came. Or did he? Was the bell broken?”

Obviously we kill that terrible ending, so the joke becomes:

“I waited in all day today for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

Much better. Oddly, I think we do need to say repairman. “Repairer” would be more accurate but in this context that could mean some kind of DIY kit, rather than a man or a woman. I think we’d spend just a moment too long unpicking that word if it were repairer. So “repairman” is wrong, but I think it’s needed.

Whereas “today” isn’t.

“I waited in all day for the doorbell repairman, but he never came.”

I think that’s where we should stop. But we could do this:

“I waited in all day for the doorbell repairman.”

or

“I waited in for the doorbell repairman.”

That turns the original 21-word joke into 7 words. Oh! We can do it with one fewer: “I waited for the doorbell repairman.”

But now I think that it definitely doesn’t work. It’s become a statement, whereas the 13-word version — the last one to keep “but he never came” — is a story. That seems to me to be the best, it is narratively complete, with a setup and a surprise.

It’s possible that I’m overthinking this.