Transcription
Well, comedy is essentially anything that makes you laugh. That itself, and come in many forms and genres, ranging from stand-up to talk shows, to films, all the way to inside jokes you have with your friends. With all these different mediums where we consume comedy, very few people have ever tried to create something funny themselves. And if you ever do, you realize it's very, very hard. None of your ideas are original, none of your sentences are interesting. And whenever you think you have at least something funny, when you say it out loud, you get flashbacks to Hamlet in high school English.
Even if you wake up in the morning and decide you're going to become funny by learning the rules of comedy, that ends up being about as useful as deciding to become good at math by remembering the numbers. In reality, the way that funny people make something funny is not by filtering content through an elaborate rule set and having jokes come out the other end, but by starting with one tiny idea, even just a word, and building on it. They take one boring sentence and turn it into one interesting sentence, then into a funny sentence, then into a punchline. Then they add a setup to get there. Then they do it again and again, continually regrouping and rehashing material until finally they have something to perform or a show to release.
But if you're sitting there with a blank Word document or empty thoughts, wondering how you're gonna write anything creative, how do you even come up with even an original boring sentence, let alone an interesting one or a real joke? And that brings us to the first goal of comedy writing, which is going from literally nothing to something. Anything that's funny. And that means starting with the simplest possible form of joke, which is a setup to establish a premise and a punchline that breaks the audience's expectations. So let's take the easiest type of setup that you get every day, which are questions.
So here's the question: Thing you do in your kitchen? So now the problem here is not only do you have to break the audience's expectations, you have to do it in a way that still fulfills the initial premise the setup has established. Otherwise, the joke isn't funny. And this creates a comedic dilemma. Out of the infinite number of things you could respond with, some are funnier than others. So how do you generate and narrow down the range? And the first thing you need to do is establish what are the audience's expectations. And in this case, it's very obvious: it's something you would physically do in the kitchen, but more complex than usual.
So let's start generating responses by adding an additional layer each time. What is the most complex thing that you do in your kitchen? Make a big cake. This is literally the most complex thing you've done in a kitchen, and it's not funny. Build a giant rocket ship. This might be the most complex thing you can think of done in a kitchen. Again, not funny. What is the most complex thing that you do in your kitchen? Make microwave noodles. This breaks the audience's expectation of complex. It's not that funny, but it is interesting. Argue with my wife. This breaks the audience's expectation of what is usually done in a kitchen. It's not that funny, but it's interesting.
What is the most complex thing that you do in your kitchen? Sometimes I ask myself if a half carton of eggs is considered a meal. This breaks the audience's expectations that what you were doing was physical, and their expectation of complex. And it's sort of funny. So then, what have you broke the expectation of complex, the expectation of physically doing something, and the expectation of what is usually done in a kitchen? I think kind of sort of cream units. The most complex thing you do in your kitchen.
[Music] [Laughter]
So after generating a joke, the next step in building something comedic is one of the most important, which is delivery, or how you tell the joke. The reason this is so important is because no matter how well a song is written, if you can't sing, the song is gonna be complete garbage. And this is a lot harder than you think, because for good delivery, you also need a good setup. Here's an example of a bad setup and bad delivery, which comes quite naturally. I have a problem right now. I have too much pickle juice leftover at home. So what I've been doing is putting the extra pickle juice on my sandwiches to make them taste better.
So this joke is actually technically structured correctly. You establish a premise, you state your position on it, which sets an expectation, and then you break the expectation in a way that still satisfies the premise. Setup, punchline. It's technically a joke. The issue is, is that it doesn't flow at all. It sounds like I'm reading the joke. The language is super boring. The audience is confused because after the second sentence, everyone is wondering why you have too much pickle juice, not what you're gonna do with it. So you have to close that loop before moving on to the punchline. In essence, it doesn't sound right, and it doesn't make sense.
Here's a better version. I have a situation in my apartment right now. Have a surplus of pickle juice in my apartment. Too much pickle juice. [Laughter] The pickles are all. I don't like throwing out the pickle juice. Excess feels wasteful. So lately, I've been differing my fingers in the pickle juice and I flick it on my sandwiches for flavor.
[Music]
So a key takeaway that all comedians employ is always committing to the joke. If you start mumbling or lose confidence in your delivery, the audience always senses it, and you lose them. You see that a lot when someone is telling a joke or story in conversation because they're trying to gauge their audience's reaction to see if they're still listening, which is a mistake. You have to always tell the joke with the assumption everyone is going to listen, because that's what makes people want to listen. If people still ignore you or interrupt you, you have to rethink the material, not deliver the joke more timidly, hoping for encouragement.
Here's a segment of one of Louis CK's bits where the delivery is the crux of the joke, the most important part being his use of complete silence that most people would be scared to use out of fear that they get interrupted. Okay, like, of course, of course. Children who have nut allergies need to be protected. Of course, we've to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times. And anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course. But maybe, maybe if touching that kills you, you're supposed to die. Of all people, you'd think you know the damage you can inflict for a misplaced nut.
So one more example of a good delivery is comedian Norm Macdonald, who often has jokes that fall in the category of so bad they're good, but he delivers them with so much confidence, you know, it's absolutely calculated. Here's an example. Is this two-hour season finale of Melrose Place? There's this movie coming out, yeah, title undetermined at this point. Chairman of the Board. Oh, all right. Do something with that. Usually, the board is felt. Bo-re-do.
[Applause]
So once we have a setup and a punchline, and you can deliver it well and get a laugh, you have to be able to revise the joke. One of the most important techniques that you can use to improve your comedic writing in speech is increasing your specificity. For example, saying, "There I was in my car, hoping it was powerful enough to make it up the hill," isn't nearly as funny as, "There I was in my four-door Fiesta, hoping the gradient wouldn't crack 15 degrees." Or saying, "That's the saddest thing I've ever seen," is not nearly as funny as, "Sadder than a club-thumbed girl who loves pistachios." A little bit niche there, but you get the idea.
For another example, if someone asks if I love football, I could say, "Yeah, one of the higher-ups in the NFL could kick a kid with his shoes on, and I'd still watch the game on the weekend." Which isn't very funny. It's actually kind of mean. But when you're a lot more specific about what they would have to do to get me to stop watching, you know, I love football. You want the commissioner could literally punt a baby across this office. And what you might notice there is the language Bill Burr uses is actually far more brutal than what I used, but it's somehow way funnier. And what you'll find is that refining a joke and adding specificity to make the punchline hit harder, you run the risk of offending the audience. As an example, if you replace the word punt with kill in the previous example, it is absolutely not funny at all, even though you would literally accomplish the same thing.
Which brings us to one of the most useful rules of thumb in comedy, which is no subject is off limits, as long as your joke is funnier than it is offensive. And Pepsi doesn't pay your bills. The theme being, you can't laugh and be offended at the same time. So in addition to specificity, the next element that is essential to good delivery is the cadence of the joke. This is an area where literary skills are actually useful, because to me, cadence is just so much about how you write the words as it is about how you say the words. And there's really no way of teaching this, because what you're aiming for is the precision of writing with the fluency of speech.
And this is why most stand-up comedians improvise their setups and have their punchlines memorized to the word. Ultimately, you just have to practice a lot, read a lot, listen a lot, and you get better, because it's fundamentally a matter of taste. The same way inexperienced decorators, these colors and shapes go together, you're trying to do the same thing with words. One of my favorite exercises is taking common feelings that are difficult to express and then shorten them down to be brief and punchy, which is what a lot of the word of your British comedians do. An example is instead of saying, "feeling sad in hindsight," you could use "debilitating retrospection" or "sadness when I remember." Instead of "not bad," you can use "repressing melancholy."
These are the techniques that got us internet cliches for always sad, like crippling depression and constant despair, which are now all common parlance in the British and Canadian lifestyle. So I think with that, anyone who gets started building something funny, it might only be enough to write one line that's worth two laughs, but that's where you start. Literally, that's where you start. One day you'll find yourself with four or five, and then you can use the same techniques to tie them together into something bigger. Eventually, you might get to the point where you need to learn further skills to realize a bigger goal, like how comedians such as Bo Burnham went from singing funny songs on YouTube to entire hour-long musical performances, and then to directing his own movie. Or how The Simpsons started with shorts that weren't even that funny, and then went on to the most celebrated cartoon ever made.
It really, for myself, the thing that I love the most about comedy compared to most visual or literary arts is that you can't fake it. You can write bad fiction, make uninteresting paintings, or take cliché photos because it's subjective. You can shelter your ego from criticism and even think you're profound because no one could or cares to prove you wrong. But when it comes to comedy, if you're not good, no one laughs. No one has a good time. No one says, "Well, at least though, I think you're talented." And you realize it's not the world that doesn't get it, it's you. And I think the pursuit of being funny does best show that it isn't about giving up or trying again, it's about giving up or getting better. So I guess I'm saying comedy is like cancer. So I'll leave it at that.
[Music]