I Search 'What'

Now how the hell am I supposed to sum up the total of my experience in Comedy with a brief retelling here? Well, the journey of a thousand miles... The first thing I learned from the greats was the Theory of Relativity. Not everybody finds the same stuff funny, in other words, humor is relative. So how do you tailor your material to the people that you're in front of? I have gleaned two answers to this from listening and reading. On the one hand you can get to know all kinds of people and tailor your humor to each individual audience. The only problem with that is a mixed audience makes for a forced, choked act. You are afraid to appeal to only one section of your audience, or to offend them. On the other hand you have a more open approach that produces humor that appeals to a very broad spectrum of people and can be used in most situations. The latter seems to be the smarter approach and keeps one from getting forced into a niche like Jeff Foxworthy or Steve Martin. Jeff Foxworthy is trapped into doing 'Redneck' humor and has only one kind of audience. The inevitable result in his case is creative stagnation since his audience only wants to hear the same thing over and over again. That kind of formulaic repetition is fine for him since his audience never seems to tire of it and it was never relevant to begin with. Here let me try one... If you've ever killed a deer with your truck because you were too drunk to shoot it, you might yada yada yada. The material writes itself.
Steve Martin achieved an almost rock star status with his slapstick brand of humor and was locked into it for too long. It was hell for him to be so well educated in Philosophy and the performing arts but to be telling off color jokes to drugged out audiences wearing Groucho glasses and a fake arrow through his head. Jeff Foxworthy seemed happy with his success, his standup is based on personal experience and he caters to an audience of like-minded people. Steve, though, was trapped by the comedic lowest common denominator for an audience and felt completely out of place. He actually describes himself as a very unfunny person and his approach to comedy was more academic. He would write the material and try it out noting where the laughs happened. Then he would rearrange the material like a composer writing a symphony with chuckles, chortles, snickers, and guffaws as his notes and precisely practised comedic timing his measure and meter. Eventually Steve moved on to write, direct, and star in many feature films. A great deal of them accentuating his talent as a serious actor as well as a comedic actor like "Grand Canyon" or "A Simple Twist of Fate" based on Silas Marner. Jeff had a sit-com and the blue-collar comedy tour. Again we see relativity. Jeff was relatively as happy with his limited exposure as Steve was with his great variety of performance outlets.
The broad Spectrum approach is much more common and much more useful. You find many of your television comedians use this approach, talk show hosts like Jay Leno or David Letterman and anyone who hopes to have their own sit-coms. They use topical humor and tried and true, time tested quips at everyday troubles and toils that anyone can relate to. "My mother in law used to live with us. We had to Euthanise her, though. It was the only time I ever had an animal put down so that I would stop suffering." or some such. The greater percentage of these comedians work with very non-offensive subject matter and would find it uncomfortable to 'Work Blue.' Some can work with racy subject matter and using great command of langauge and context make it palatable to a surprisingly wide audience slice. It is a dangerous gamble, though. The greatest success in this kind of Comedy comes from those who with intelligent, current and avante garde subject matter attract the youthful and educated audiences wishing to come out of a comedy show having learned something, having their perceptions changed while still being entertained. If any audience appeals to me it is they. They are also the hardest to attract.
The next tool in their belt seems to be flop, the human side of that is ice cold flop sweat. There doesn't seem to be a comedian who hasn't had an audience hate them and that is very telling. Even the best of the best had to fail. It is the initiation to the fraternity of the sad clown. There is a sick and masochistic quality to this that seems to echo through the performance arts in general. Failure is important in all lines of work though. In my first job as a waiter I worked for Red Lobster, two weeks into it they fired me and said I would never be a server. Since then I have done nothing but. That failure lit a fire in the woodstove that won't go out. One can go too far and get too involved in the performance arts, letting the audience fill emotional holes best occupied with better things. Jerry Lewis can't do telethons anymore and is but a shadow of his former self. He has become quite obese and racked with pain for the falls he took on stage he really took. He used pain medicine to dull the aches from his physically destructive act but nothing could fill the emptiness, nothing but more laughter. It is a sad irony that the man who was so brilliant in movies like the "Nutty Professor" could be ridiculous in his own written acts. He never learned to write a joke, hence he had to destroy his body to just stay competitive with younger comedians. There is a strong lesson here to develop fundamentals in this game early and keep them honed and strong. Again we see the importance of the construction of the basic joke.
The audience is the ultimate boss here and they don't tolerate a liar. They may tolerate a clown, but not a liar. Carlos Mencia said in his act that he did a show for Cerebral Palsy victims and they wouldn't let him off the hook. One of the said to him "You do Black jokes in front of Black people and White Jokes in front of White people, why can't you make fun of us?" In that is, in my opinion, to be found the crux of humor. The lessening of tension about situations that cause us anxiety like the loosening of chains around our hearts. As important an occupation as any other when employed with ethical and moral conscience. Now, with all this stuff out of the way, I guess the basic sum total here still equals: How do you write one funny joke?