A while ago I was working on a book about the art and craft of stand-up. I’ve decided against it, mostly because a quarter of the way into the 21st century, it’s no longer how we learn that kind of thing. You’ll find the content here on possibly on a YouTube channel.

But when I was putting together the info, the system to really understand the practical side of the comedian’s path, I developed four axioms for comedy and labelled them the “Noble Truths” of stand-up (cynical, because the 4 Noble Truths in Buddhism are all about suffering). And a couple of years later I’m still seeing how true they are.

One of them is that Inconsistency is the enemy of Comedy, and that’s an idea I’ll be unpacking today. It’s a simple idea, but very powerful. I’ve seen cases where a comic will struggle to win audiences over, struggle to make their material land, struggle to establish themselves and get any kind of following… and in most of these cases, that comic has a Consistency problem.

What’s a Consistency problem? Well, we could also call it a Congruence problem, or a Cognitive Dissonance problem. It’s when there’s a conflict between elements of your act. This could be you not looking like your material or your material not agreeing with your other material.

This isn’t a controversial idea: If the audience is struggling to find out what what you stand for, or if they’re busy trying to process massive shifts in tone or attitude, your success will be greatly diminished. Remove those speed bumps and the audience will find it easier to like you and to laugh at your jokes.

I know that most people view stand-up comedy as dumb and easy – chuckles and dick jokes – but the truth is kind of the opposite. Being a comedy audience member takes mental effort and a mindset. To laugh, we have to decode a message that streams to us in real-time, and to decode it in a way where we can appreciate two or more simultaneous meanings, and to do it in a sequence and with the correct timing.

That’s how misdirection (one of the staple comedy techniques) works. The comedian’s job is to present it in a method where you process the information the right way. If they stream it to you in the wrong order, get the timing or emphasis wrong, or don’t plant the seeds for the desired outcome, nobody will laugh. The comedian’s trick is to surprise you but make you understand them at the same time.

It’s good trick, but hard to pull off. There’s a lot of ways to fuck it up. The surest way to fuck it up is to use up an audience member’s mental bandwidth on something else. Like a distraction, or encouraging them to solve another problem at that same time.

This is why a lot of comedians dress neutrally: You’re not going to get my clever joke if you’re busy reading the wacky message on my shirt. Hell, if I’m one of those comics who dresses “wild and crazy” then 90% of your brain isn’t even listening to the material.

And what puzzle is going to fuck up your jokes the most? The one where I’m trying to figure out who you are. If I can’t understand what you’re about, that’ll completely eclipse every joke you’ve got. I shouldn’t be trying to work out where you stand while you’re setting up your punchlines…. not if you want them to work with me.

Sometimes mixed messages are an inconsistency between what you say and what you present: like a man who presents as gay doing homophobic material. And sometimes the mixed messages are literal messages that don’t agree with each other. Have you even seen someone alternate between jokes that are “woke” and their opposite? You’ll think “WTF?” whichever side of that polarity you prefer.

Part of this is because the comic seems insincere. So here’s something that feels counter-intuitive but is exemplified by all the famous comics at their top of their game: We like authenticity.

We know comedians are fabulists. We know that they make shit up. We know that some of their jokes couldn’t possibly be true. But…. we also want to identify. We want to feel we know that person, or at least something about them. We want to understand where the jokes come from. We give a comedian license to make stuff up… but we also hate feeling fooled, cheated and fucked with. If you’re obviously insincere, our Spider-Sense™ will tingle and we’ll get the disturbing feeling that you don’t like us and that you’re doing something shitty

But It’s not just about authenticity. Consistency optimizes your act. The audience has a better chance of decoding your joke if they’re not also trying to decode you at the same time. When you tell a woke joke and a racist one, you won’t get two laughs. More likely, they’ll cancel each other out.

For this reason, it’s in your interests to work out who you are as soon as possible. This is often pragmatic “branding” advice from industry dudes who tell you to develop a strong and singular identity for marketing purposes. But I’d give you the same advice for comedy purposes. Your jokes will work better if they’re not fighting each other, confusing the audience and cancelling each other out.

The audience isn’t going to really get your act until work out who you are. And they won’t work out who you are until you’ve worked out who you are. Working out who you are should be your most urgent priority. It should be more important than collecting a few minute’s worth of jokes.

And here we come to the crux of the issue. Consistency is mostly a newbie problem, and it’s one newbies make because they come from a Scarcity Mindset. Let me explain….

When you’re new, you don’t really understand how jokes work, so you don’t really understand how to write them. So you might attribute a lot more value to jokes than they’re really worth. When you’re new, jokes appear to have a lot of value and a consistent identity appears to have low value. When you truly understand that it’s actually the other way around, you’re on your way to becoming a real comic.

A newbies’ first “five” minute set might consist of a few “street jokes” (ie. not original but not something you could attribute to an author either), some half-baked ideas, and some riffing. Most likely this performer built their “five” over a period of time that couldn’t possibly be sustainable to deliver regularly, and they haven’t worked out how to create new jokes easily. So they treat jokes as precious and tend to use everything they know.

This is a mistake, because many of these jokes will contradict each other, confusing an audience and undermining the development of a comic’s real asset of value: their persona. When you overestimate the value of one-liners and underestimate the value of a meaningful brand you’ll be inclined to use all the jokes and contradict yourself. You’ll wonder why you can’t get any traction when you have all these jokes.

Of course the answer is simple. Consistency is prime. When you’re new, audiences don’t expect you to have three hour-long specials up your sleeve. You’ve only got 3 minutes of material for your five minute set? All is forgiven. You’re only doing 3 minutes? Even better! But if you present us with a confusing and abrasive mashup conflicting messages that have us pondering whether you’re an actual consistent person with integrity, or a random joke jukebox with a random and incongruent playlist, we’re gonna resent you for every extra minute you spent confusing us.

Of course, it’s not just a newbie mistake. A few years ago I attended a comic’s “workshop,” something I typically avoid. This one wasn’t bad. It was more about drinking and sharing our stuff than actually asking each other for help. Good thing too, because the advice I’ve seen at most of these is appalling and should be outlawed. At this one, one of our most venerated and popular comics revealed his brilliant plan for the next gig.

“I’m going to switch frequently,” he told us. I’ll pander to the ladies and say something really Girl Power. Then I’ll tread on it and say something sexist and cheeky for the benefit of the guys. Then I’ll woo the ladies back with a bit more feminist pandering. But then I’ll backhand it with something condescending. I’ll keep everyone on the hook, tightening and loosening the reel. It’ll be clever and masterful. You’ll see!

If you’ve read this far you’ll already know what kinds of deep reservations I had about this.

But I told myself to trust this comic. He’s a local legend and everyone loves him. And I reminded myself that his mastery of pandering and condescension are unrivaled by anyone else I’ve ever met. Let’s see how he pulls this off…

It didn’t go well. At any given time, half the room was pissed off, and nobody was impressed by the Jekyll-and-Hyde channel surfing. It was tiresome and the jokes quickly devolved from only having 50% appeal to none because nobody thought there was anything sincere or substantial behind any of it. It was pretty excruciating to watch.

I now know that to pull that off a stunt like that, you need a solid foundation, a consistent identity so fucking strong that the jokes themselves don’t present any significant conflict. You need big consistency to get away with that level of inconsistency.

The moral of the story? Your sense of self, your integrity and the identity you build are worth so much more than mere jokes. Experienced comics often give their material away, realizing that a joke is good but it’s not necessarily good for me and my act.

Experienced comics know that their consistent identity is more valuable than punchlines. When you’ve been a comedian for a few years you’ll see that creating jokes is easy and working on your self is hard, that presenting a consistent and credible persona helps your material inconsistency undermines it. Perhaps the best thing you can do for yourself is to stop working on your material and start working on your act.