For this post I’m going to sound like some kind of corporate shill because I’m going to rave about a product. I’m not being sponsored in any way – I just love my Rocketbook. It perfectly solves lots of comedian-specific writing problems.

Just as I advise people to avoid spending their time and money on mistakes (like Mini-Golf in Townsville or Taco Bell anywhere), I’m enthusiatic about sharing my exciting discoveries.

I’ll quickly say this about sponsorship, though: If anyone wants to send me money or free samples of something I like, I promise I won’t be too proud to accept. I’m suspicious of comedians who’ll happily take money to talk about their genitals and insecurites but not about an item they like.

A stand-up performance is the tip of an iceberg. The quips and observations look effortless but a lot goes into their creation. If you’re a comedian you’ll be spending time writing, and that starts with a decision about the actual platform you’re using to write with.

I started with note books – the default choice. Pros: Easy. No gadgets, batteries or cables, no wifi or learning curve required. It’s portable enough to take out to the deck with a beer, down to the cafe or to the day job without any hassle. Pen to paper is apparently also the optimal interface for creativity.

Cons: Editing is tricky. You’ll want to substitute a word to see if it’s more effective. You might want to try this with fifty alternatives. You’ll want to rearrange the sentences or see them in a different order to find out what works best, and this isn’t easy with ink on paper.
Accessing your work is tricky. Unless you’re lugging around your growing pile of notebooks everywhere your platform isn’t as portable as you think – not if you want to refer to your source material.
Organising your work is tricky. When you’re accumulating a body of work you the need to find your jokes by theme, type or topic becomes more important and harder at the same time. Most comedians end up making some kind of database where they can organise and find their jokes easily – handwriting just ensures you’ll be doing data entry from your scrawl later.

I know comics who use dictaphones or record their voice on their mobile phones when they come up with an idea. It’s a great idea for when inspiration strikes: easy to just mumble into your phone so you don’t lose that thought. It’s amazing when you get an idea in bed at 3am but for me that’s where the usefulness ends. I can’t actually “write” like that; turning on record and uttering sentences when I have complete ones is going to make a recording that’s going to be horrible and time consuming to listen to, and I’ll have to because I still need to get the information out and copy it elsewhere – voice recordings are even worse than note books for editing, accessing and organising your stuff.

Because editing, accessing and organising material is so important for comedy writing, digital solutions make sense. Word processors are amazing but they’re not always the easiest way to capture ideas in the first place. Looking at a blank page on screen is an invisible roadblock to expression and you’re tempted to start editing immediately. Word processors make you wear your Editor hat over the top of your Writer hat; you start censoring yourself before you’ve even got anything.

I also don’t take my laptop with me everywhere. It seems portable until I remember I’m useless without a mouse. I need a stable flat surface, cables and power source if I want to spend any real time on it. I can get more battery time and portability with a tablet or phone but that means typing onto a touchscreen which is annoying (for me, anyway – I never could write a 20+ minute set on my phone keyboard).

Organising the jokes is what digital storage does best and I’ve heard of comics say they keep Excel spreadsheets to sort their bits by topic and theme. That sounds effective but I’m way too lazy to copy all of my content from Word into spreadsheet cells. The struggle is real, though; When I write a set I’ll need everything I have about a theme I’m working on, and sifting through heaps of files for it all is a pain.

I heard Joe Rogan recently say he uses Scrivener and I was impressed – I also own Scrivener and didn’t realise comics might also use it. It’s a brilliant word processing program that authors use; it saves research notes and pictures and snippets, lets you organise projects and even publishes as an E-Book if you want. It’s a fantastic program and it’s really cheap for what it is. I recommend Scrivener to writers all the time. That said, I’m really glad I’ve got a solution for comedy that I don’t need my computer for.

I spent most of 2020 looking for interfaces I could take anywhere and just write on, old-school style, that would still give me the digital powers to organise and access my material. There were tablet-type solutions which look impressive for a business executives, but they seem too flimsy to travel with. I don’t want to worry about spilling a drink on it in a club or having to bring even more chargers and power cables with me everywhere. Also, some of these devices looked really expensive for a one-trick tablet. The comments under the online ads sealed the deal for me: too many people waiting 6+ months for theirs after they paid, and too many complaints about malfunctioning devices and buggy software.

What I bought was a Rocketbook. The idea is deceptively simple: it’s a reusable notebook with pages I can wipe clean with a wet cloth. There’s a phone app and codes on the page that make scanning the pages easy, so I never need another notebook.

Scanning the pages automatically sends it to one of 7 destinations I can assign. They can be cloud drives, email addresses, etc. My default location is a Comedy Notes folder in my Google Drive. I thought I’d make folders and have different locations, but there’s a clever feature that makes organising my stuff really easy.

I can write ##Paranormal Investigator## at the tope of a page, as I’ve done in the picture. Then when I scan it, the page automatically saves in my Comedy Notes folder with the filename Paranormal_Investigator.pdf – and so does anything else I save with that at the top. If I put ##TITLES## at the top of the page, it’s automatically saved that way – and that means everything in my drive is automatically sorted by category. Instant organisation!

If I want to write something about Fast Food, I can easily flick through my pages saved as Fast_Food; As I mentioned in my last blog post I also have pages filled with random musings, fun facts, half-formed ideas and other mental debris I collect. I save all of them as ##Brain Droppings## and often browse through those saved pages for little things I can use when I’m putting a new set together.

Between the book and the app, my ideas are all easily backed up and categorized – and available from anywhere I have my phone. This system has been a game-changer in the way I write and it’s made me many times more productive than I was.

Another awesome feature is OCR: When I scan a page it can also save a Word Document using Optical Character Recognition to make a text document from my handwriting. This could be amazing for copying and pasting, rearraging ideas, etc. I don’t take advantage of this because my handwriting is awful – the computer translations of my scribble are sometimes just as funny as the joke I wrote – but it could be an amazing tool.

One of things comedians talk about is whether to be ‘loose’ or ‘scripted’, and which is the better approach. The ‘loose’ guys bravely take the stage with just bullet-points or their ideas, and talk with the words that occur in the moment. This is an organic, natural way to perform and it feels a lot more intimate and ‘real’.

I tend more towards the ‘scripted’ approach, which can feel inauthentic if you’re not delivering your material naturally or responding to the energy in the room – but the advantages are in working out the most effective and economical way to say it, making the funniest and most powerful word choices. When I started thinking about the word structure I started wasting less time saying “umm” and “you know,” stumbling over tongue-twisters, etc. Properly writing my sets make my performances punchier and funnier, I was less likely to run overtime (which is a big no-no) and I could present more material.

Both approaches have their advantages and pitfalls. Lately I’ve had the opportunity to write some longer sets and rigid ‘verbatim’ performances aren’t practical to write or memorise. The nice thing about having more time is being able to present more organically and ‘looser.’ When the legendary George Carlin, famous for his word-play, was asked about scripted vs. loose he gave a 50/50 answer, emphasizing that some bits rely on the script and the rest is better without it.

This is how I write longer sets these days: I’ll make a page/file for a set and write a setlist on it with the ‘bits’ (and any relevant segues) with separate pages/files for the bits that I need to provide wording for. The filename will be a kind of hyperlink from the set to the bit. The Google drive I’m scanning my stuff to has folders for Sets, Random Ideas, Themes, etc. And everything inside them gets automatically sorted if I’m using the ## titles to save them. The set I end up with is tight when it needs to be, looser where possible and all organised and easily accessible in my Google drive.

I love gadgets, but it turns out my favourite gadget isn’t actually a gadget at all. It doesn’t have buttons or use batteries; it functions like old-school paper and pen. has the advantages of high and low-tech solutions, costs a fraction of the what the other products do. Oh, and I’ve probably spilled hundreds of alcoholic and/or caffeinated drinks all over it without any issues!

My Rocketbook turns out to be my perfect answer for the problem of how to write and access usable comedy material. It goes with me pretty much everywhere and it’s really helped me level-up my comedy game. I’m still interested in what processes and tools other comedians use, and I encourage you to drop me a line to tell me about your method, but that’s my curiosity – after 4 months with my Rocketbook I can say that my own search for a solution is officially over.