Bits

One of the hardest things about writing is deciding what you want to write about. It’s ironic that I was having such a hard time deciding on a topic and then she suggested I write about how hard it is to write.

Outside of the one-liners you see on the sides of Laffy Taffy, writing a joke usually take a long time. First, you have to have some sort of trauma. Without the trauma, you don’t develop the need to spread joy through joke writing, or deflection, or whatever it is you call being funny. That usually takes years to recognize and develop. But it’s a pretty big step. For the sake of time, let’s say you have that.

Joke writing typically starts with a single thought. It can be something observational about yourself like, “why do I give myself a bedtime” or “does anyone else run up the stairs after they turn the lights off?” or it can be something observational about others, like, “you never see anyone with an office job that also owns beaded curtains”. These things aren’t funny yet, just examples. Alternatively, you can also completely make something up that you didn’t observe at all. For example, “I was at the park and someone in a car asked me if I wanted to buy a hotdog.” This is what we call a premise. What would I do if an unlicensed vendor, perhaps just a random stranger who had a cooked hotdog in their car, asked me if I wanted to buy one?

With all of these ideas/thoughts, my next step would be to find different wants to approach my point. I would want to explore what is both relatable and absurd about the idea.
Absurd: compare it to an ice cream truck or a food cart and describe the differences.
Absurd: describe what a street drug called “hot dog” would look like and what it would do to you.

After you get your premise, you will create short jokes about the premise. These are called, “lines”. You put a lot of lines together to create a “bit”. If your bits flow together and intermingle, you call this a “chunk”. A comedy set is made up of a lot of bits, or a few chunks if you’re doing a lot of comedy.

The last step of writing a joke is telling it to other people to get a reaction. The favorable reaction would be a laugh. If you’re a man, a gasp sometimes is okay, because you are allowed the opportunity to expand. If the joke doesn’t work right away, the best comedians will give it a few times and try to rework it until it does. The worst comedians will yell at the audience for not laughing.

Being a comedian does require a lot of work, but, if you work really, really, REALLY hard, it usually never pays off and your legacy will be that “hotdog in the park” joke that haunts you forever.