I like coffee. I mean I really like coffee. The rest of you say you like coffee but you actually like sugar and milk. It hurts my soul when you place your order and say “And a Babycino for the little one.”

Are you fucking kidding me? Your drink is sugary milk served in a Sippy cup with a little plastic nipple to put your lips over. They’re all babycinos, Susan!

Seriously, if you really love coffee you’ll drink Espresso like I do. It’s strong and black, and tastes like battery acid and broken promises, but it’s real. Tell me how much you like coffee when you graduate from daycare…

You might have heard me say this on stage, as it’s part of my “Iced coffee” bit. I’ll be talking about coffee today, but as an analogy. We are, as usual, discussing the art of stand-up comedy.

A theme that I keep returning to is that there’s certain “rules” around the craft of stand-up that have merit, but slavish unquestioning adherence to common wisdom, treating tips like laws of nature, often misses the point or backfires.

I’ve written that while these tips are smart and based on pragmatic advantage, you don’t have to hit your first punchline in 15 seconds (but you’d better get everyone’s attention in the first 15 seconds). You don’t have to flagellate yourself with self-deprecation to make people like you. I’ve written that our word economy, while important, shouldn’t be so aggressive we cut all the fun out of the material.

Today I’m thinking about the practice of Tagging. Now, let the records show that I’m a fan of tagging. I do it all the time,. Tagging is the practice of adding another punchline, even two or more, at the end of a joke.

It’s about surfing on the momentum of a joke by adding extra chuckles or alternate lines at the end. It’s incredibly efficient, letting us increase our LPM (laughs per minute) by getting lots of punchlines for only one setup. It also keeps audiences in focus.

The more time you spend on punchlines and the less time you spend on setups and new premises, the better. Tagging is unquestionably good practice. I use it a lot. I’m very big on my sets having a theme or through-line, and tagging works naturally with that.

But can you have too much of a good thing? Possibly. I hear comedians in much bigger comedy scenes (New York, etc) observing that it feels played out; that it was a direct result of a laughs-per-minute obsession that doesn’t matter so much today, and that it’s tiresome watching a comic obsessively wring every last drop of potential value out of a premise.

I experienced this yesterday watching a comic, a very funny comic, working a bit about the Dalai Lama’s inappropriate behaviour in front of the media this week. It was a funny bit, but the comic worked it and worked it, tagging the fuck out of that premise.

It was like the Dalai Lama fucked up, it’s in the news, and he’s going to milk it for everything it’s worth. He was doing ok, but as he continued it started to feel a bit cringe.

Also, and this is something that happens whenever any comic sits on a joke formula for too long, I started thinking more about how he was doing it than what he was doing. For example, if a comic does 10 minutes of puns or one-liners, our minds start to instinctively grasp the secret joke formula (both are simple formulas, but especially so for puns), and we’re gradually less delighted/surprised/amused by new punchlines: we’re half expecting them.

In this instance, as the comic went on I started feeling like these are basically old Catholic priest jokes rebranded with a Dalai Lama skin because that’s what’s topical this week (and, as I’ve said before, most topical jokes are less original or specific to the current affairs than they initially seem). The longer he went on, the more I started feeling disenchanted, and this wouldn’t have happened if he’d quit while he was ahead.

And that brings me to my coffee analogy. I like espresso, but I like ristretto even more. Ristretto is “pulled short” with a smaller coffee using less water. It comes out sweeter, with more flavour and body. So you’d think a little’s good so a lot might be better? Nope.

The opposite of this, pulling long and pushing more water through the coffee can be “over extraction.” One quotes I pulled from Google says “Over-extracted coffee can taste bitter, dry or empty, lacking body.” Another says “Over-extraction occurs when you take too much of the soluble flavours out of the coffee. This level of extraction results in unfavourable flavours.”

This strikes me as very similar to how comedy can work. Overtagging is a lot like overextracting coffee, and going past the sweet spot to try and pull every bit of value out of something doesn’t always give us the best results.

The comedian’s sense of economy will tell us that there’s diminishing returns in extra jokes. We might write 20 jokes about the Dalai Lama, but they’re not all equally great and we’ll punch a lot harder if we just do the five best ones. I’ve got about 5 pages of witty observations about supermarket self-serve checkouts but if I drop more then three of them in a single set it’ll look like a Ted Talk.

What’s the sweet spot? Well, that’s for us to trial-and-error. Comedians should always be doing A-B Testing, seeing which word combination works better, or which emphasis of the punch line is more effective. A good comedian will, rather than tell you every single thing they have to say , test audiences to find the right level. That’s what Open Mics are for.

The Rule of Three is a pretty good indicator though. It’s a time-tested comic principle that, being the absolute minimum required to establish a pattern, meets the comedian’s need for economy. We use the Rule of Three all the time to set-up and smash expectations, but it’s also the perfect number of examples to illustrate a point. There’s a Todd Barry bit which I can’t remember much about except after the third example he says “3 is enough examples” and gets an extra laugh from that. Trust me when I tell you that 3 examples is better than 10 examples.

When I see a comedian pull out a sheet of paper and then give us a long list of reasons for something, or a long list of popular song names with dog breed puns in them, I strap in for what I know will be a really fucking dull stretch in the set. That comic isn’t presenting their best work. They’re presenting all of it – every single semi-amusing half-formed thought they’ve ever had – and most of it’s not going to land.

Those comics need to edit themselves and cut 75% of that shit. Having wacky thoughts is only a quarter of a comedian’s job. The rest of it’s editing. Editing is important. Every great award winning movie leaves scenes on the cutting-room floor.

I treat doing stand-up the same way I approach business negotiation or anything else in life. I’ve learned over my many, many, many years that showing all of your cards is nowhere near as powerful as showing them a bit and knowing you still have more up your sleeve if you need it.

For me it’s all about Ristretto. I’ll take a short-shot of beautiful sweet full-bodied coffee than a mug of watery bitter swill every single time.

Now, just to show the counterpoint, I’m going to link to a hilarious bit by Jim Gaffigan where he talks about Horses for 11 minutes. At first the humour comes from the jokes, but then it comes from the fact that he’s still flogging that dead horse, and then the humour is about how annoying it is. It’s a great bit but unless you’re Jim Gaffigan you probably don’t want to try it at home. Enjoy!

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