Misdirection in Stand-up Comedy (And a Dog on a Train)
- Chris Head
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
My September newsletter
Hi all,
A reader of my newsletters asked when there was going to be another photo of my daughter's dog Faith. Always keen to serve the needs of my readership, I have dug out a recent one.
In this photo I am writing a Substack article on How Stand-up Comedy Works. (I wasn't really - I was working on a speech I was helping a guy with, but this way I can plug my excellent Substack). Here's the growing archive. Have a read and SUBSCRIBE for new articles on How Stand-up Comedy Works every Monday.
Oh, hold on a minute, just realised the truth of what I'm working on in the photo allows me to plug my speaking coaching. I help with all kinds of things that are corporate and business related, and I just had great fun working with a different fellow on his best man's speech.
Working on wedding speeches is one of those services that with my laissez faire marketing style I have kept entirely secret! (Bascially people have to work out that I might be able to help, they ask, then I do).
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Misdirection in stand-up
In the pic we're on a train (my favourite way to travel). My daughter meanwhile is now 17 and she is starting to think about driving lessons. Which gives me an excuse to revisit a couple of driving lesson jokes and to write about misdirection.
Misdirection is perhaps the most fundamental stand-up technique. Here’s a great Jack Dee car joke (from his shortlived sideburns era) that’s an example of misdirection.
“I was going to get a BMW. I ring my dad, who knows a bit about cars. I say… ‘what do you think?’ He says, ‘you must be kidding.’ He says, ‘you can’t get a German car after what your granddad went through in the war.’ And I didn’t know about this …. My granddad, during the Second World War, he had a succession of very unreliable German cars.”
Classic misdirection.
How can you write this kind of joke? One way is to be alive to ambigious statements. It’s perfectly possible that Dee came across this phrase somewhere (that was said genuinely): ‘you can’t get a German car after what your granddad went through in the war’... and noticed an unintended ambiguity, and a joke was born.
Then he adds a great tag, which twists it once again:
“Including a Mercedes that broke down on several occasions. And that’s pretty embarrassing when you’re a Gestapo officer isn’t it?”
He’s talking about his kids learning to drive. First of all he talks about giving his daughter driving lessons and we get more misdirection:
“We went to Tesco car park and did the first half an hour of kangaroo starts and wrong gear and reversing instead of going forward and scratching one or two cars. And then she had a go.”
It’s the classic kind of misdirection where we make an assumption (his daughter is behind the wheel) which is then subverted (he, the father, was behind the wheel).
Here's even more misdirection from Jack Dee on driving:
“Last September, went to a family wedding in Cornwall. And I saw my 14 year old son with a pint of beer in his hand. Now, call me old-fashioned that for me that’s too young to be carrying on like that… It’s a bit embarrassing. I had to go up and have a quiet word with him. I said, ‘What are you doing? You’re meant to be driving us back’.”
And he adds:
“You can have 3 pints max. I’m watching you okay?”
How to use Misdirection
With misdirection you set-up one idea or attitude, then you flip it.
To use the two approaches we’re exploring here, you’re either:
Saying an ambigious statement. he audience make the obvious interpretation.
Or setting up the belief you have one attitude, then flipping it to reveal you have the opposite.
In these Jack Dee examples, firstly, with the terrible driving in the car park, the set-up doesn’t say who is driving, so it could be either person, but we naturally assume the daughter is.
Then we discover Dee himself is behind the terrible wheel. The art of this kind of misdirection is crafting a statement that is ambiguous. The audience only see the obvious interpretation then you reveal the surprise.
I didn’t learn to drive until we were planning to move out of London and into the Cotswolds in my late thirties. I started my lessons in London and at the time while compering a student stand-up gig, I said:
“You get a lot of road rage as a learner driver in London. The other day, I was in a lesson and I stalled and suddenly I hear: ‘You f**king muppet! Get off the road until you can drive properly’. And I went, ‘steady on, you’re mean to be teaching me.’”
It does the exact same kind of situational misdirection as the Jack Dee joke.
The attitude misdirection is more straightforward. You make it appear you hold a typical attitude to the topic – then reveal the opposite. So, initially Dee seems unhappy with underage drinking. Then we discover his contrarian attitude. He’s actually okay with underage drinking - and drink-driving at that.
Try some Misdirection! (On the topic of driving)
Write (or find) an ambiguous statement on driving (see the two driving lesson examples above). Lead the audience to make the obvious assumption, then flip it to reveal the situation is not what they assumed it was (the classic situational misdirection).
Or set up the belief in the audience that you have one attitude, then flip it to reveal you have the opposite. (Attitude misdirection).
And of course you can apply the self same techniques to any topic.
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