Comedy teacher, comic and writer Jerry Corley gives three reasons to develop your writing. They are:
- Writing Makes it Easier to Build Structure into your Material
- Get More Laughs
- Comedy Writing Enables you to Make More Money
He knows what he’s talking about, and I’d like to add an example and a few notes on why you should think about humorous modes – and the other theories I’ll write about – when writing. Because there’s a hard way and an easy way.
The Hard Way
There’s a stand-up comic working in my area, Matt Keck, who took a calculated approach. The idea was to make a viral YouTube video. So he watched a bunch of videos that had gone viral, tried to figure out what they all had in common. This is what scholars would call an inductive process, from examples to general rule). Then he made his video, and hit – if not comedy gold, at least comedy paydirt:
The video went viral and was picked up by Tosh.0. It also produced several parodies, references and spin-offs. As of today, the video has been viewed over 20.5 million times, Keck has gained over 35,000 subscribers, plus he was paid by Tosh.0, and continues to collect ad revenue. He done good.
Now, this is not to say it’s easy. This method is very hard, and doesn’t guarantee success. Just check out his other attempts, like the follow-up: I’m So Saucy. Yes, it benefits from the popularity of the first one, but was nowhere near as successful.
Why? There are a lot of possibilities. What he was doing was no longer novel, more videos like this were created between his two attempts, and we’d already seen that shtick, from him, before, etc. This is why Hollywood directors and studios cannot guarantee the success of any movie, though they are really trying. So I don’t recommend doing that much work.
The Easy (well, Easier) Way
The easier way is to find the general strategies that work and use them. Again, they don’t always work, and the same tricks won’t work the same way for different comics, or even necessarily for the same comic twice, but that’s what keeps it interesting. Most people serious about the craft are already doing this.
Comics talk about humor all the time, in podcasts and interviews – I’m looking to compile and break down a number of those for later posts – but our conversations don’t often discuss the scholarly research in the area. Humor classes sound like a good idea, but they get a bad rap because some of them are rip-offs.
It’s frustrating to me when I listen to comics and comedy teachers talk about writing and see that they are implicitly referencing the scholarly theory, but they miss aspects of it. It’s like a failing grad-student read the paper and thought, “There’s a market for this!” Then dropped out and ran with it. They gussy it up with fancy, buzz-word terms and make it their own, but most of them are saying the same things based off an imperfect understanding of a bigger idea that’s older than Aristotle.
So that’s why I’ve started this blog: Partly to organize my thoughts on the theories and their applications, partially to get me reading and writing every day, but mostly to get stuff that is public and free into the hands of those who can use it – and to convince you that you do need it. In short, to promote better comedy.
Questions? Comments? Thoughts? Additions?
I’d love to hear about (and not pay for) what people are learning, and try to explain them via the bigger theories.
Have you taken a comedy class? Was it different than any other composition (writing) class? How? What did you learn?
