All Jokes Journal - Avoiding The Predictable Punchline

Working with Raymond Lambert to co-write the book on his comedy club, All Jokes Aside, is flowing pretty well.

Watch the trailer for Phunny Business, the documentary about

All Jokes Aside, by clicking

this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ6mJoePHd4

 

One of the snags I encountered, however, was in one of the early chapters that tells the story of how bringing in comedian Steve Harvey for a weekend of headlining shows back in March '91 literally saved the club from closing. The challenge I encountered was how to rewrite the opening line of the chapter without relying on clichés.

 The line used the phrase "mortgaged the ranch" to describe how Raymond and his business partner had overextended themselves to keep the club going - bouncing checks to vendors and maxing out their credit cards just to keep the doors open.

Since this chapter gives a lot of background about All Jokes Aside, it took a fair amount of time to put all the details in place. But I managed to get most of the story in the proper order after a lot of rewriting and rearranging of facts and quotes.

But that pesky opening paragraph and that darned cliché "mortgaged the ranch" kept giving me trouble. I couldn't figure out how to reword the opening line without using yet another tired phrase.

So what's wrong with using clichés? Many best-selling authors use clichés all the time, and it certainly hasn't hurt their book sales.

But in this case, I feel as though using a cliché, especially in the opening line of a chapter that is meant to pull the reader into the rest of the story, is like telling a joke with a predictable punchline. It just won't do.

So I finally resorted to Googling "cliché busters" and came upon a blog by Oxford University that offers tips on how to avoid clichés. The prestigious British university defines clichés as "words and phrases that are used so often that they're no longer very interesting or effective."

This blog (which can be accessed by clicking this link: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/avoiding-cliches/) actually provides tools on how to rewrite a cliché-ridden sentence.

First, you examine the cliché for key words and the actual meaning of what you're trying to say. Then you look up a synonym for the key words in a thesaurus, or simply rewrite the sentence in a straightforward way that gets your meaning across in your own words.

Using this method, I ended up changing the worn-out "mortgaged the ranch" to "had a lot at stake." I suppose the latter could also be considered a phrase that's fairly common, but at least it's not as overused as the former.