As soon as you explain a joke, it immediately becomes unfunny.
People confuse the subject of the joke with the target of the joke, and they're very rarely the same.
I'm used to explaining to people why my jokes were funny.
My least favorite joke right now is Donald Trump.
Jokes are a lot about meaning. I think if we understand what jokes mean and why they work, we'd understand everything else. Genuinely I do.
I speculate that the genesis of the chicken-joke lies in some situation such as the one illustrated above, but over time the original context of the joke was lost, which left the chicken sadly decontextualized.
There is nothing worse than annotated humour.
My writing process is very feedback based - I listen to the audience. I try to understand what's connecting, what's not connecting... and then rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Chris Gethard and I have been on the road a lot together. When we get on the bus at night, we talk about the jokes that didn't work and the joke possibilities that could work. I think this is a little different from other writers.
We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator... Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or 'stage' Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.
Real racist jokes or sexist jokes aren't funny - not because they're offensive, but because they're not true. As soon as a joke is based on an untruth, it's not funny.
You can either just have fun with the joke or you can have fun with the joke and think about the implication of it. It's totally up to the listener.
A lot of the comedians don't even tell the joke. Like only three tell the joke, the rest of them dissect it.
