Three acts on where they got the inspiration for their jokes about a dad's best friend, emailing cheese and elephants with accents

Mr Chrome of Rubberbandits: "I smell like Joop. My son has croup"

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I once told my dad that his best friend Wayne Fogarty tried to spice up a family christening by murdering a badger with a fence post in front of a load of kids. It wasn't true, but my father believed it without question, because that's exactly the kind of thing that Wayne might do.

Recently I wrote a song about men like Wayne. Men who love most of their kids. Men who summer in Thailand, but they're not like all the other johns. Men who don't give blood. Because they won't give blood. The song is called Dad's Best Friend because most people have dads, and lots of dads have friends, and some of them are like that. I'm not saying that most men watch hardcore porn in the shed while their wives put the children to bed, but we all know one who definitely does.

I'm painfully aware of how many songs there are about how much a woman loves a man. There simply aren't enough songs about the middle-aged man who babysat you once and thought it was grand for you to stay up watching Videodrome. The guy who used to sit in your kitchen smoking fags and telling your mother how much of a legend your dad was the time they went to Lanzarote, but he can still beat him at arm wrestling.

We all know him, or bits of him, and I think that's why I wrote the song. What's weird is, people tell me they can identify someone exactly like that. I'm not sure they can though. I suspect they only see glimpses of someone they recognise. The odds of them actually knowing someone who would rather fry an egg on a Travelodge iron than have dinner with his wife and her son are probably slim. This hasn't stopped people commenting on my song.

I've been told that it is a withering portrait of narcissistic self-deception by a man who so thoroughly believes his own lies that his impending existentialist crisis, brought on by post-recession financial devastation and ever diminishing youth, will only force him further down the path of increasingly aggressive assertion of his self worth. But you could say that kind of thing about any song.

The song doesn't really have any deeper meanings. It taps a vein though. Maybe one between the toes, and that's why he wears golf socks with sandals. It's hard to write at length about your own work without sounding like a flute, so I'll leave you with the sage words of Wayne Fogarty: "It's a good song, but it's no Champagne Supernova."

• Rubberbandits will be playing the Udderbelly festival at Southbank Centre on 10 May and the Gilded Balloon for the whole of the Edinburgh fringe

Marc Lucero: Sausages as friends on Facebook

Reading on mobile? Watch Marc Lucero here. Warning: strong language in this clip

A lot of my material concerns technology and the constant development of this web-dependent world we live in. I thrive on the contradictions and ridiculousness that are all around us. When Mark Zuckerberg developed Facebook, did he envisage it would become a marketing tool for meat products? Do meat companies really believe that sales will increase dramatically, now they have a Facebook presence? I for one have never been tempted, despite being a keen consumer of sausages, to send a friend request to the meat company, the same way I'm not going to follow gravy on Twitter.

I try to put two ideas together, perhaps one technological and one a world event or situation. Past gags have included: "I still maintain that Osama Bin Laden was traced by his ATM withdrawals after the US froze his assets and his bank would only let him have a cash card."

In the early days of the internet, when online grocery shopping became the norm, I had a routine about one supermarket having the ability to email customers cheese. People would come up after a show and comment that the rest of the circuit was talking about internet porn and I was going on about emailing cheese. I believe you have to look for a different funny: everyone is going to go on about popular TV programmes or celebrities, and we as alternative comedians are supposed to provide an alternative topic or point of view.

Some words are funnier than others. Noël Coward would use words with hard consonants. In a piece about his aunt, he talked about having to give her a lift to Folkestone; Deal would not have been funny. I try to apply this rule and can remember doing so since childhood. I've got a routine about upmarket health food shops having security guards on their door. One bouncer radios the other that he needs back up after a disturbance in chives – marjoram, pepper or star anise wouldn't have worked in the gag. One reviewer said I have an inalienable skill with language. I had to look up inalienable in the dictionary.

I have enjoyed writing my new show, George Carlin Saved My Life, as I have to find humour in tragedy. It's about me searching for my mother and going to southern California. Things didn't go well, and on the way to receive some bad news, I got mugged for some digestive biscuits I'd bought as a gift en route. On hearing the bad news I couldn't stop thinking about the biscuits.

• Marc Lucero: George Carlin Saved My Life is at Leicester Square theatre on 17 May

Tony Law: "An Indian elephant and an African elephant walk into a bar"

Reading on mobile? Watch Tony Law here. Warning: strong language in this clip

My elephant routine started from arriving at a new material night with nothing prepared. So when panic set in a minute before I went on, I decided to go for the walk-into-a-bar type angle. I did tigers and lions and they had a good old chat about life and bars. Next time out I changed it to elephants. I figured that people doing an Indian accent was rubbish as all my Indian and Pakistani friends have such English accents. It felt funny to counter that with the African elephant (most African friends I know have English accents too) then suddenly having a cliche African accent. I felt like it was mocking lazy racists and liberals all at once. Each time, I'd add more elephants – each more implausible than the last. I ended up having eight but I cut it to four.

I could never end the routine. So my friend Ricky Skinner and I wrote a song about Tony not being able to end his show. Then my collaborator Storm Davison started making elephants and painting them and we thought it would be interesting to hang them around the room in the dark and light them – but not speak, just leave the song on.

We couldn't afford to light each little elephant, so we gave torches to audience members around the room so they could see them. We also had elephants pre-hung in the rafters. I added elephant images and video on two screens that kicked in when the song really picked up. The images and video were of all types of elephants and drawings of elephants, sculptures, anything elephant-based you can imagine. The last image was a slow-motion baby elephant running after its mummy. It was so obviously manipulative and a cliche that it was both hilarious and moving.

• Tony Law's Nonsense Overdrive is at the Udderbelly festival on the Southbank from 15-19 April. He will also be taking a new show to the Edinburgh fringe