Creativity Thoughts – Writing Jokes

My second post-pandemic in-person standup comedy class begins this week. “Standup Comedy Teacher” seems like such an obscure occupation. But then I recently spoke to a friend who is taking DJ classes at a DJ school. It’s not a DJ University, not yet at least. Looking forward to Tik Tok College because everything is harder and more complicated than it looks.

Creativity gets a lot of respect, as it should. But I don’t think it’s something inaccessible to only a chosen few. I think everyone is creative, it’s just a lot of work to access it. It’s coming out of a hole in the ground while digging with a spoon. There is a reason Hollywood keeps recycling and repurposing the same content. For all our content creators nobody wants to sit alone in a room and ruminate with an idea. It is most exhausting way to do nothing. And, yet, for me, that’s where it all comes from.

I believe anyone can learn standup comedy in the same way that anyone can learn to play the piano. We may not necessarily become a concert pianist but banging out chopsticks is still playing the piano. Art happens when you love your chopsticks or your child’s scrawl. Flowers will eventually grow through the cracks of the cement. Sometimes I am the flower, but mostly I am the cement.

A famous comic (whose name I forgot because fame is fleeting) once said that standup is not art because it’s goal is to elicit a specific reaction. Good point. This famous comic also creeped on someone in the green room (to be fair so did 90% of male comics pre-2018). Hannah Gadsby had a problem with standup having to always be funny. It’s a guard rail that can make a performance predictable. I can’t really watch most standup because I either see the punchline coming or I am coming up with my own. It seems salient that standup comedy should be funny because laughter is implied in the word “comedy.” But I also consider standup comedy as art because there are so many ways to come at it. And you can do it however you want. If you think comedy can come from falling down on your way to the stage AND the audience laughs, then you did it. (I did know a comic whose entire act was falling down. It worked but eventually was hard on the body)

I am old school and I like to tell jokes. I can write dumb jokes, but I prefer jokes that say something meaningful about myself and/or my thoughts on the world. And by thoughts I mean anger at the world. But after years of writing jokes, I often feel like I am scraping the bottom of the peanut butter jar. For me, jokes seem to either come from labor, the Gods of Comedy, or major life changes like a breakup, sickness, childbirth, marriage, alien abduction, etc..

So barring divine inspiration or dramatic life experiences (which tbh I don’t really want), how do you get the magic out? It’s pretty laborious and kind of boring, probably like learning how to DJ.

A great writer/comic friend once told me that he writes down true statements. Steve Martin likened jokes to geometry proofs and logic in his book “Born Standing Up.” So I think there is something about the blanket cold hard truth that lends itself to what we call in the biz a “premise.”

Exercise: Write ten true statements about one or more of the following age old topics:

• Love/Relationships/Marriage/Dating
• Aging
• Work
• Family
• Passions (Cooking, Zumba, humming bird feeder)

For example: I am single and childless.

This is quite true. It is very true. You can not argue with this statement in terms of logic or fact.

So how do you come up with the punchline? To be honest, sometimes I reverse engineer jokes because I come up with the punchline first. But often the punchline is in the premise. It might be in the grammar or sentence structure, as proven by Steve who wrote jokes like “Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.” Or it can be in relation to the cultural assumptions. What is the opposite of single and childless? Married with children. What do you think of when you think of women married with children? Family and love, if you talk to Fun Dads, or exhaustion and overwhelm, if you talk to Tired Mothers.

Final joke: I am single and childless. Or as I like to think of it. Well rested.

Most of society would assume I would follow “single and childless” with a self-pitying Bridget Jones-style self-deprecating statement. Maybe a comment on my age or weight. But that story has been told a vomit number of times. That is not the story I want to tell. I don’t want to state that I hate men and children. But I am not living the life of an overwhelmed mother. I am not tired. And while I am also not well-rested it sounds funny because it’s pretty extreme.

Did you learn something? I sure did. Tune in next time when I talk about “The Artists Way.”