Last week I attended a Masterclass by the brilliant Jacques Barrett and there was a Q&A component at the end.  A question that kept popping up was how to come up with ideas and write material. It’s a topic too big to cover in a Q&A session, but the struggle is real; Developing your “act” is great but it’s hard to get far without actual content.

In the nearly 2 years I’ve been doing this I’ve written just over one and a half hours of good material (tested stuff I will use again), another 20 minutes currently in development and about ten minutes I’d prefer to forget about forever. I’m not claiming to be a brilliant writer (although you can say it – I don’t mind) but I don’t experience any of the angst or difficulty I’ve heard about. For me it’s the most creative part of the whole comedy process, so it’s my favourite bit and I find it relatively easy.

There’s a thousand ways to write and they’re probably all better than mine. They’re all implemented by comics who are more successful than me. I just don’t use techniques that don’t suit me. You have to find what works for you.

The most common advice I hear is about enforcing discipline. They say write every day, set aside 3 hours, switch off your phone and everything else and just force yourself to write.

Yeah, nah… Fuck that. I wouldn’t write anything if that’s how I had to do it:

1. I’m not disciplined. I’m really, really not. I’m actually pretty bloody lazy. Any plan that involves self-discipline probably isn’t for me. In fact when people ask me how I find the time, I reckon it’s probably what I save by never rehearsing/practising like other comics apparently spent lots of hours doing. Did I mention I’m lazy?

2. I can’t commit three uninterrupted hours every day and I don’t know anyone who can.

3. I don’t believe that boredom’s good for creativity. I think that’s a romantic myth, like how depression is supposed to make you really creative too. (Pro Tip: That’s the opposite of how depression actually works). Most comics I know get their ideas by reacting and responding to stuff…. stuff that’s out in the world. To write observational humour you need to be observing something. Comics who live in airplanes and hotel rooms end up writing about airplanes and hotel rooms. If you spend a third of your waking life in detention, that’s what you’ll have to write about. Sure, turn off your phone if you need to but I suspect comedy ideas come from exposure to the world, not quarantine from it. Locking yourself in and trying to force ideas? I’m pretty sure that’s a recipe for writer’s block.

A quick word about writer’s block: I don’t suffer from it and you probably don’t have to either. If someone’s been paid big money with a deadline to deliver, they can worry about writer’s block. But me? Nobody’s paying me shit. The only pressure I have is from having to make my money elsewhere. Writer’s block should only be a thing if you have real pressure to produce.

Most of us (and I’m thinking of my friends who are writers, musicians, artists, etc) don’t have any pressure to create, so I roll my eyes when they talk about writer’s block. What they really mean is that they want to talk but have nothing to say. They should probably just wait until they’ve got actually something to write about. Fortunately for comics, the world is ridiculous so there’s always something to say about it.

I’m not going to say much about Joke Writing here. There’s lots of info about that around and it’s too big to go into here. (If you can say something that creates assumptions and then say something that smashes the assumption, or if you can compare and contrast two different things, you’ve already got the tools for two of the major joke structures and you’re well on your way). What I’m talking about here is ideas for jokes and what to talk about; not how to write jokes, but how to write a set.

I suspect the friends of mine who talk about how hard comedy writing is are working something like this: They try to write a joke. They create it from scratch, punch it and polish it to make it funny until they’re finished. Then, they try to think of another joke and do that. Rinse and repeat. In solitude. I suspect that’s maybe the hardest way to do comedy writing, and what you might end up with could be a collection of one-liners that aren’t related to each other.

There’s some strengths and issues with one-liners. Some brilliant comedians do/did them (Mitch Hedburg, Steven Wright, Jimmy Carr, Nick Thune, Anthony Jeselnik, Demetri Martin, etc) and because they’re compact jokes you can get a lot of Laughs Per Minute with them. The trouble with one-liners is that, because they exist in isolation, they’re hard to write and memorise a whole set of them.

Also, when you present a bunch of one-liners, you’re resetting and starting from scratch with every joke. Some comedians have observed that because of the constant gear-changing and adapting to a new premise every few seconds, audiences become tired. Apparently constantly resetting for new premises creates a cognitive load, and even the tiniest cognitive load is like a speed bump for comedy effectiveness. Also, the audiences’ subconscious figures out the mechanics/formula behind the jokes after a few minutes and their effectiveness drops. When they realise that each joke is a new premise that isn’t going anywhere, all the mental effort to keep return to square one every couple of lines makes audiences turn off after a while. From what I’ve been told, one-liners can make a really powerful 3-5 minute set, but for ten minutes or longer you’re really struggling.

I’ll take their word for that; I’ve never even tried because it seems like a really, really hard way to write. My way is much easier (for me).

I tend to have a theme for my sets. Not all my jokes will be about the theme, but it’ll be the framework I fit them all in. I view it as a structure bit like a Christmas Tree that I can then decorate with baubles (jokes). It helps me present otherwise unrelated ideas, do jokes and tags without having to set up premise groundwork for all of them, and gives the sensation that it’s all going somewhere. Coming up with a framework skeleton and then filling it in with the jokes also lets me separate out the writing tasks so I don’t necessarily have to work on a jokes’ mechanics and it’s cosmetics in the same session. I’m all about breaking jobs down into bite-size chunks.

A story is a good framework to hang jokes from, too, though I found it’s shortcomings pretty early. It’s probably the easiest way to write a set but trap is that a complete story is a rigid framework format. At the beginning when I didn’t even know that time-management is a very big deal I routinely had to choose between going over time (which is a no-no) or cut the end off my story and the punchline off my jokes. Also, if the audience isn’t 100% down with the story, you don’t have a lot of room to move except dropping the whole thing and switching over to your backup engines (which is when you’ll be really glad you write lots of material). They were an easy way to start writing sets but these days I go with themes instead.

An example I have of a theme idea I wrote was my most recent set, which was “When I’m elected” in which the chunks were all about things I want to see changed, with the promise that I’m fixing it ‘when I’m elected.’ The reasons why I thought this was a really good structure for a set:

1. A lot of jokes are usually based around grievances or observations about things that are perverse and/or wrong with society. This set plays up to that.
2. It’s a simple idea that’s instantly grasped by an audience.
3. The set could be as long or short as I wanted. If I ran out of time I could drop a couple of the jokes, or throw in more examples if I found extra minutes somewhere.
4. It lends itself to ‘ranty’ chunks, and ranting is a really easy way to build intensity over the duration of a set.
5. Lots of crowdwork potential if I were so inclined (I never really am, though). I could ask for ‘policy suggestions’ or even who people plan to vote for, ask loaded rhetorical questions. I could get a round of applause for who’s going to vote for me, who’s in favour of legalizing pot, etc.

Mostly, it was just really easy to fill with jokes. I have a #when i’m elected file that I now add to whenever I see something that annoys me or strikes me as weird. And that brings me to the actual bit about how I generate content…

I don’t do any of this in a linear procedural way (did I mention I’m lazy?). I see capturing ideas, refining ideas and working on sets as different tasks. I carry a smallish notebook with me everywhere. I use a Rocketbook and I’ll post about it separately because it’s a brilliant tool that solves a lot of comedy writing problems for me – I’m just waiting for them to pay me a massive corporate sponsorship 😉

I’m happy to put something in the notebook that’s not a joke and might never be a joke. Weird trivia facts count. Today I saw that the oldest recipe in the world, from ancient Egypt, is for beer. I threw that in the book. I also found out that the McDonalds drive through was invented for the American army because their tropps weren’t allowed to wear their uniforms in public. These things might never become jokes but I might use them as part of something else one day. I also note weird things for sale; some genius has combined a zen mindfulness sandbox with a kitty litter and that’s got me thinking about joke potential… but I don’t have a joke about it yet so I throw it in the book. And anyone who’s seen me recently knows I’ve had lots of fun talking about Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina-scented candle.

I was also thinking about Heidegger and his Dasein theory (yeah, I’m a philosophy nerd) and hearing an analogy about how you’d think centipede needs to use a lot of mental bandwidth to coordinate 100 legs but it doesn’t – It just walks instead. I threw in something about that and hope it makes sense later. I also wrote “Why do girls think vampires are sexy? They’re fucking parasites!”

The closest thing I wrote to a joke today was a bit of a compare/contrast thing. The band KISS are promoting a documentary about them in the news so I thought about them. I was never into them, but I remember people saying that they’re satanists and their name is an acronym about it. I also remember the trading cards, the action figures, the movie, the bubble gum and all the fucking happy meals merchandise.

Mostly I remember being disappointed when I heard their music – safe commercial pop, mostly, and not a single adult concept or example of foul language in their entire fucking catalogue. My older school friends were introducing me to punk music so I thought KISS were lame, sheep in wolves’ clothing.

What I wrote was that parents were very concerned about KISS and thought they’d be a bad influence on impressionable kids… and they were absolutely fine with Michael Jackson. Who doesn’t love this kind of irony?

So I wrote 6 things today; Oldest recipe is beer, Maccas drive-thru was for the military, Zen Garden Kitty Litter, Centrepede Coordination and Vampire Parasites.They’re not jokes and I might never use them, but jotting down five interesting things during my day is a good haul and I’m satisfied. I save most of this stuff in a folder I titled (in a nod to George Carlin) “Brain Droppings.”

I create files for themes I’ll use. I created a “When I’m Elected” one and stuck all the relevant ideas in there. I’ve made them for Fast Food, Find Dining, Online Dating, Religion, Shopping, Alcohol, Employment, Surveillance Culture, Getting Older, etc etc. These become buckets I drop ideas into. They’re not all jokes. Mostly they’ll be half-formed ideas like ‘Brain Droppings’ except I’ve hitched them to a theme. And yes, I’ve started a file called “Parental Controls” and that’s where I put my musings about KISS and Michael Jackson.

When these files have enough stuff in them, I see if I can make a set out of it. I’ll go through what’s in the file and see what bits can become jokes, what stuff makes a good tag. I’ll have a sift through ‘Brain Droppings’ to see if anything in there would fit in this set or make more sense in the context of the theme I’m working on.

Sometimes that works out really well. I did a bit 18 months ago called “Porn Challenge” (that was 5% about porn and 95% about political correctness, and assertion that we progressive types aren’t all easily-offended ‘snowflakes’) and I realised that the my Hungry Jacks scribbles (“Rodeo” is a flavour there and it tastes like BBQ sauce, uncertified palm oil and the tears of underpaid workers thanks to Scott Morrison’s intern scheme) might fit there. It did, and became the high moment of the set. Now, I always check Brain Droppings to see if there’s something in there for the set I’m working on.

That’s basically it for me; collect and record random ideas and reflections, file them so I can find them. When I have enough in a topic to maybe make a set with I’ll start playing with the pieces in there, and I’ll also look through my random assortment to see if any of that will work here. By the time I have enough nuggets in a file to think maybe there’s a 5 minute set there, I’ll mostly be right. Especially if any of the spare parts in my Brain Droppings folder work well in it. With this method I usually have five or six sets in development at any time, and I don’t have to work very hard to do it.

I don’t think my way is the only way or the best way. I just don’t think I’d be very good doing a disciplined linear writing model, sequentially grinding out one joke at a time. Collecting stuff, jotting down random thoughts and channel surfing different themes I know I’ll be interested in talking about later. Dressing the christmas tree with the baubles I’ve collected feels like the easy way to do it for me. When I hear friends of mine talking about what a struggle it is to write comedy, I wonder what process they’re using to do it. My messy undiciplined way might be easier for them. Or not. It’s personal.

I’m interested in how other people do stuff, so if you’ve got any ideas, feel free to drop me an email.