Hit By a Comparison

I don't know about you, but I love hearing the same joke twice.

I really do. I have this penchant for deconstructing jokes, which I understand is never a good idea (E.B. "The Man" White said it best: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”), but I just can't help myself.

So I figured what might be funnier than explaining comedy would be just sampling two flavors of it.

(Fortunately, it's not two versions of the exact same joke, but two riffs on the same topic: being hit by a car. That should be a little more interesting to the casual bystander.)

Both are YouTube clips, which are legal to post here, but I recommend just listening to the audio of each. The video element doesn't add much to stand-up comedy in most cases, in my humble opinion.

We'll go in chronological order, so the first will be Eddie Murphy from 1982, and the second will be Dane Cook from 2005.

Both are hugely successful comics, though neither of these guys are technically part of the comedy pantheon, so I think it's a reasonable comparison. (Eddie probably gets a little more respect among comedians than Dane does, though. His early routines got criticized for being a dumbed-down version of Richard Pryor's stuff - which Eddie acknowledged by admitting Richard was his hero - while Dane's comedy draws flak for being more theatrical than cerebral, and he runs around on stage yelling a lot. He's also accused of plagiarizing jokes from Louis C.K.)

Hey, and both are pretty profane, just so you know.

1:


2:


So which is funnier to you?