Everything starts with the jokes. Until you’ve got material that consistently gets laughs, you’ve got nothing – and you need at least five minutes of quality material to move to the next level. So where does it come from?
I try to have a strategy. So, here I try to make explicit what I think I and many other comics do. My process is based on the writing practices that I’ve learned in school and in turn teach, seasoned with a bunch of stuff I’ve read. So my seven step plan is: 1. get a theme, 2. get a premise, 3. write the joke, 4. pare it down, 5. find your voice, 6. make it funnier, 7. put it on stage (repeat 4-7)!
1. Get a theme
Maria Bamford, in episode four of her Comedy Central show Lady Dynamite, defines comedy as “A unique take on a universal truth.” That all starts with the idea, what the Greeks called “invention,” which for our purposes has two parts: theme and premise.
So first there’s what we can call the concept or theme, that’s that “universal truth.” For me, this is usually something I find bothersome – Note: not hilarious, or even necessarily amusing, just something that irks me. Controversial comedians will pick themes like politics, religion, or the “-ism’s,” etc., but we can pick anything, from similarities and differences among specific groups and things (men and women, dogs and cats, etc.), to crazy stories.
Where do these come from? Life. The Media. Anywhere. Keep your eyes open and observe the world around you, and take frequent notes.
Then I consider how widespread the problem is. Your jokes have to be relatable to your audience. Ideally, they should have had the experience you have had, or near enough to help them see it your way. Sure, they’ll suspend disbelief and go with you on a theme, but if they really don’t understand it or are completely opposed, it won’t go well.
Also, some themes are so used up that it’s hard to find anything new to say: The differences between men and women, masturbation and dick jokes – we’ve heard it! Find something new to talk about.
2. Get a premise
The first step was finding the issue or “truth.” The next part of invention is to ask: What’s your take on the theme? Sure, everybody follows the news, but what do you see that’s been missed? Those types of people exist, so what? This is where you need to be unique, or at least novel. Even a stale theme can be revived if you have a unique perspective; it’s just harder to find one.
Also, this is a place to develop your persona. The jokes you tell come together to form a story about who you are, what your perspective is. You might put some thought into that, so at the very least, you don’t tell jokes that contradict one another – unless that’s your strategy.
Ok, you know what you want to say about the theme, and you think it’s novel. Now stop. Ask yourself: Why is that funny? What’s the joke? If you’re like most people, you may have trouble answering. Good comics develop a type of sixth sense for funny stuff. They may not know why it’s funny, they just know that it is. Seasoned comedians say they know exactly why a bit is funny, exactly why the audience laughs (Borns), but I can point to many examples of when they were wrong.
This is where those Humorous Modes help me, and give me a vocabulary to rethink my joke. Is it making fun of people? Superiority Theory. Is it a taboo topic? Relief Theory/Carnival. Is it just quirky and weird? Incongruity Theory. This is where I think a lot of people make a mistake: My job is not to find which one “fits best,” let alone which one works all the time. My goal is to be able to explain it in as many different ways as possible. The more reasons people have to laugh, the more likely they’re going to.
So, now you’ve got a unique take on a universal truth. Great. Now you’ve still got to…
3. Write the joke
What the Greeks called arrangement, you have to decide how to tell it. There are a number of joke forms, but the basic idea is a one-liner or “nugget”: “set up” the theme and premise, then hit them with the punchline (Attardo & Raskin; Borns). It sounds so simple. It’s not.
Some comics I talk to think in terms of one-liners. A fairly successful, young guy was telling a newbie the other night that he should just write set up/punchline, and get used to that form, before he tries to branch off into stories or other forms. I wouldn’t go that far. However, breaking a joke or story apart after the fact and finding what’s essential to the set up – and what the punch line is – can certainly help.
Those who follow Incongruity theory suggest that you should set them up with a set of expectations, and then violate it, go somewhere they never saw coming in the punch line. However, others suggest that there should be enough clues in the set up (or your persona) so that they should have seen the punch coming.
Script Theory [coming soon] similarly says a joke consists of two overlapping scripts that are in opposition, frequently one bona-fide and another non- (Attardo & Raskin). For instance, onstage I talk about the difficulty as we get older of making friends, “It seems like you used to be able to go down to your local watering hole, have a few sodas, talk to the locals and make some new friends. Now they just look at me like, “Why are you even in this Chuck-E-Cheese?” The “older,” “watering hole” and the emphasis I place on “sodas,” puts up the script or frame of going to a bar as a 20-something, but it also lends itself to the script that I’m going to the same places and doing I did when I was a child. The punch line changes the script from the one to the other. Usually, I pair this with another joke about being older and not trusted around children, so they really should have seen this one coming.
As I said, other forms exist, like “puzzle-solution,” “headline-punchline,” “position taking,” and “pursuit” (Atkinson; Heritage & Greatbatch), then there are stories – I’ll get into them in a later post.
In any case, you need to know when the joke is over so you can pause and let the audience laugh. This is dangerous, as they might not, or they might laugh earlier, so to a certain extent, you’ll have to roll with it, but some preparation is wise.
4. Pare it down!
Cut, cut, cut and cut again. My mantra is “Less talky, more jokey.” You want word economy – as big a laugh in as few lines as possible. If you’ve broken it down and put some thought into it, this step is easy. Anything that doesn’t move it along and set it up? Cut it. Details make you who you are, and they can make the joke quirkier, and provide “jabs” (see below) but more often than not they just get in the way. Cut it.
5. Find your voice
Although I write my own stuff, I often don’t write it down, at least not at first. I find that it’s hard to produce my voice in a written form. [I struggle with that here as well.] Often times I’ll write a joke down – and it’s HILARIOUS, BTW – but when I go to say it, it doesn’t come out right. I realize, I wrote it in Louis CK’s voice, or Stephen Colbert’s, or Lewis Black’s, or Chris Rock’s – and I can’t pull that off.
So instead, what I do now is say the joke out loud, and repeat it over and over, until I’ve worked out the wording. Then I write it down and break it apart. Then I repeat the new version over and over, until it sounds right.
6. Make it funnier!
I repeat: The more reasons people have to laugh, the more likely they’re going to. Here again, Humorous Modes are my friends. They give hints as to what the joke is, and help me think about both expanding it and adding new elements. But there are a number of other concepts that also help me.
a. Jabs & Pags
First off, there’s the idea of “jab lines,” which are short jokes or asides in the set up of the joke (Attardo; Tsakona). I like ones that are slightly incongruous – like taking a pot shot at a internet celebrity while making a joke about freeway signs. Again, we could think of them as a separate set up/punchline that just interrupts the bigger set up, or we can think of them as essential to this joke – they keep the audience on their toes, laughing throughout, when they would otherwise just be listening. I have had a bit of success when I keep the audience slightly off-balance.
Then there’s the idea of a “pag” (Scarpetta & Spagnolli). A pag is an expansion on the joke with follow up laugh lines. It’s set up-punchline-punchline-punchline. I try to think in threes or more. You can get away with a longer set up, if it leads to more pags. You do want the laugh to build, so general organization rules apply: your second strongest punchline first (you want to guarantee that they laugh), your weakest punchline, then your best. That’s just the initial strategy. You’ll tweak this over and over onstage.
b. Wording matters
Think about your wording, what the Greeks called style. Joe Bolster says, “The difference between a laugh and no laugh is often a single syllable” (Borns, 236). I’m a huge fan of wordsmithing, and I enjoy wordplay and try to work it in whenever possible. There are a number of words in Greek and Latin, and English equivalents for tricks (we call them figures and tropes) to make your wording novel – words like alliteration and assonance – but the basic idea is you want it to sound funny. Rhyming, repetition of sounds, quirky word choices, turns of phrase, all of these can be your friends. Again, it’s gotta be your voice, but make your voice interesting!
Catchphrases or repeated phrases can also define a voice and persona (think of Rodney Dangerfield’s “I get no respect”). Further, while it’s generally a bad thing in comedy to have your punchline just be “Fuck!” – or any other taboo word – that’s what we call a ‘”dick joke” (Borns), if there’s more to the joke than that, adding a “fuck” in here or there can help it along. Just don’t lean too hard on these. Keep in mind, if you want to do corporate gigs, they often won’t hire people who are too blue. So choose wisely.
c. Perform it!
Then think about your delivery. Joe Bolster has also said, “the difference between a laugh and no laugh has also been, not a line or a word, but the way I twist my head on the punch line” (Borns, 236). You can’t just say a joke, you have to perform it! For physical, slap-stick comics, that may BE the joke (think Buster Keaton). However, even for the rest of us, things like intonation, adopting a voice, gestures, facial expression and pantomime can really help. Give them more reasons to laugh (have I said it enough?)! These things also help you develop a persona.
There’s a great Louis [CK] episode [Ok, they’re all great] where a young comic comes to Louis for advice, but the kid’s material is just tragic – not funny at all – and so Louis says, “I don’t know, do it in a funny voice,” and the guy does and kills!
What this tells me, is that leaning on such things to shore up bad material is frowned upon, but it also works, and we should use that to help our good material!
7. Put it onstage! And record it!
None of this matters if you don’t do the joke for an audience. It’s all just airy theory. Once you do the joke, you’ll learn when and where the audience laughs, if they’re going to. Joe Bolster also says, that because audiences are diverse, “hitting with twenty percent of your new material is probably a high batting average,” and it takes guts to get up there (Borns, 236).
Another benefit to going onstage is that you may also think of some new jabs, pags, wording or delivery elements in the moment, when your brain is running a mile a minute. You’ll find your voice. You’ll find out who the audience thinks you are by what they laugh at. [In a future post, I’ll talk about how to be who you want to be – which is hard!] You’ll find what works, and the joke and your persona will evolve. The open mic’s are there for practice, and we all need it!
Of course, if you’re like me, you won’t remember much, if any of that once you walk off stage. This is why it’s really important to tape yourself, and listen to or watch the tape. Borns pegs listening as half of the writing process: “to listen without writing is to be an audience, to write without listening is to be a bore” (247).
Repeat steps 4-7!
You’re not nearly there yet. You’ve got to revise and perform, over and over, to really get the joke right. Some people frown on open mic’ers who do the same jokes, over and over. And yes, you need to be trying out and developing new material; but I also see those spontaneous ramblers at the open mics, who never do the same bit twice, and so even when it’s good, it really could be better. I repeat: the open mic’s are there for practice, and we all need it! Change a word, flip it around, try it a different way. See what happens. And keep trying!
Questions? Thoughts? Comments? Additions? Do you have a process? What is it?
References:
Atkinson, J.M. “Public Speaking and Audience Responses.” In J.M. Atkinson & J.C. Heritage (Eds.). Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University (1984): 370-409.
Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin “Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model.” Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4.3 (1991): 293–347.
Attardo, Salvatore. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.
Borns, Betsy. Comic Lives: Inside the World of Stand-Up Comedy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Heritage, J. and D. Greatbatch. “Generating Applause: A Study of Rhetoric and Response at Party Political Conferences.” American Journal of Sociology, 92 (1986): 110-157.
Morreal, John. “Verbal Humor Without Switching Scripts and Without Non-Bona Fide Communication.” International Journal of Humor Research 17 (2004): 393-400.
Scarpetta, Fabiola and Anna Spagnolli. “The Interactional Context of Humor in Stand-Up Comedy.” Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42.3, (2009): 210-230.
Tsakona, Villy. “Jab Lines in Narrative Jokes.” International Journal of Humor Research 16 (2003): 315-329.
