“‘What’s the matter?’ said the farmer.

“‘Nothing, only I couldn’t make the cow sit down on it.’

“When I tell it this way it invariably gets a big laugh.  Now here’s the way I once heard a ‘chooser’ [1] do it.

[1] Chooser—­one who chooses some part of another performer’s act and steals it for his own use.

“’O’Brien came to this country and looked around for work.  He couldn’t get a job until at last a friend told him that a farmer up in the country wanted a man to milk cows.  So O’Brien got on a trolley car and went out to the end of the line, took a side-door pullman from there, was ditched and had to walk the rest of the way to the farm.  But at last he got to the farmer’s place and asked him for the job.

“’"Sure I can use you,” said the farmer, “here’s a milk pail and a milking-stool.  Take ’em and go out and milk the cows in the barn.”

“’Now O’Brien didn’t know how to milk a cow, he’d never milked a cow in his whole life, but he needed a job so he didn’t tell the farmer he hadn’t ever milked a cow.  He took the pail and the milking-stool and went out to the barn.  After half an hour he came back to the farm house all cut-up, and he had one leg of the milking-stool in his hand.

“’"What’s the matter?” asked the farmer, “How’d you get all cut up—­been in a fight or something?”

“‘"No,” said O’Brien, “I couldn’t get the cow to sit on it.’”

“See the difference?  There’s only one right way to tell any gag and that’s to make it brief, little—­like the works of a watch that’ll fit in a thin watch case and be better and finer than a big turnip of a pocket clock.”

So, then, each point and gag in a monologue is told in the fewest, shortest words possible and the monologue, as a whole, is marked by compression.  Remember, “brevity is the soul of wit”—­never forget it.

4.  Vividness

If a successful monologue writer has in mind two gags that are equally funny he will invariably choose the one that can be told most vividly—­that is, the one that can be told as if the characters themselves were on the stage.  For instance, the words, “Here stood John and there stood Mary,” with lively, appropriate gestures by the monologist, make the characters and the scene seem living on the stage before the very eyes of the audience.  That is why the monologist illustrates his points and gags with gestures that picturize.

Every gag and every point of great monologues are told in words that paint pictures.  If the gag is supposititious, and the direct right-here-they-stood method cannot be used, the point is worded so strikingly, and is so comically striking in itself, that the audience sees—­visualizes—­it. [1]

[1] Walter Kelly, “The Virginia Judge,” offers a fine example of the monologist who makes his words picturize.  He “puts his stories over” almost without a gesture.

Unlike the playlet, the monologue does not have flesh-and-blood people on the stage to act the comic situation.  The way a point or gag is constructed, the words used, the monologist’s gestures, and his inflections, must make the comic situation live in vivid pictures.