“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
People debate who said it first but the quote is generally attributed to Faulkner, who was telling us that our material gets more powerful when we approach it without sentimentality and get ruthless about whether anything in it is earning it’s keep.
We comics like to think of ourselves as ruthless. After a night spent slaughtering sacred cows and roasting our interlocutors we might be tempted to view ourselves as savage comedy beasts.
The truth, though, is that most of us are a lot more sentimental than we admit, and this is almost always reflected in our body of work. How many of us have said something like “That one’s for me” after we deliver a joke that amuses us even if it doesn’t have maximum audience impact? How many of us can say we regularly do thorough and brutal stock-takes of our work, mercilessly retiring everything that’s no longer relevant or doesn’t work as effectively as it used to?
Sarah Silverman famously observed that “Comedy is not evergreen.” She was specifically referencing society’s evolving values that can result in our jokes lacking relevance or alignment with what the community deems acceptable, but it’s also a good point when those jokes are topical or aligned to current events.
At the beginning of the year I had a joke about needing a clean Criminal History Check and a Blue Card to get an entry level job at a time when a convicted felon was elected president and the world got a new Pope. Sure, I can still get away with that joke but it’s old news. I’m now established in my job, and there are more interesting or relevant things that can be said about Trump and the Vatican. It’s about time to retire that joke because it can’t possibly earn it’s keep in my set as well as a new one can.
Regular ruthless audits of our material can help us evaluate our own development. About 18 months after I’d started stand up, I did an honest stock-take of my jokes and had to admit I didn’t have as much usable material as I’d assumed I did. Being relatively prolific, I thought I’d built up about 90 minutes’ worth of content.
This turned out not to be the whole truth. Sure, there was a lot of material but I ended up dumping most of it. Some of it had to go because it was topical – references to movies and events that didn’t have the same relevance or resonance anymore. But most of what I left behind was because I’d changed.
2 years into being a comedian I realized I wasn’t the same person I’d been at the beginning. My bank of jokes were dominated by material about drinking, dating and working a dead-end job. Of course they were. In 2019 I was newly separated, drinking heavily and doing casual work for an employer who was in the exporting as many of their jobs as possible. By 2021 none of these things applied anymore and the jokes were no longer relevant or interesting to me.
And frankly, why would I want to keep all my early jokes? Ask any comedian if they think their first material is their best, and I guarantee you’ll hear a resounding “no.” It would be weird and depressing if the answer were any different.
We should always be trying to outgrow our jokes. The only way to get better as a comedian is to outgrow your material. The path to success is to burn your own bridges. Comedians like to refer to their jokes as their babies, but becoming a better comedian means actively trying to kill and replace those babies of yours.
And this is perfectly OK. At the beginning we regard throwing away jokes as unthinkable, but that’s because we’re not good at writing them yet. We give the jokes too much value because we think it’s hard to write more of them.
It’s a scarcity mindset that isn’t conducive to getting better at generating more material. When we’re more comfortable writing new jokes, we stop being precious about them. We start to realize that no joke is worth more than your persona, the consistent voice and image you’ve developed as a comedian.
Anthony Jeselnik, who I believe is one of the greatest joke-writers around, once said that he knew he was getting good when he was able to look at something he’d written as think “it’s good, but it makes no sense coming out of my mouth.” The moment you’re able to reject one of your own jokes, even when it’s pretty funny, is the same moment you realize that your established comedic identity is worth more than any joke you could tell.
Louis CK’s epiphany, right before his career went stellar, was the understanding that he was only going to get to the next level by dispensing with his entire catalogue and writing a completely new set from scratch. He destroyed all of his legacy material and committed to writing a new hour every year – something that’s not uncommon now, but was unheard of when he made his decision.
We only get better by writing better material, and the material only gets better when we’re writing more of it. I don’t know whether that’s a vicious circle or a virtuous one, but it’s a reason to review our jokes and write more. We want to perfect and polish our presentation, which means repeating it, but there’s no getting around the need to bring new content to the table. I’ve mentioned the explore/exploit conundrum here before, but I’m feeling lately like we need to be a bit more brutal with the material we have.
Like it or not, our business needs new stock at the time. Even if it doesn’t feel irrelevant or stale to us, it can sound like it after we repeat it enough times. And sometimes “killing our darlings” can provide the incentive we need to replace them with something better.
My book, The Self Made Stand Up is available as a paperback or e-book from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books.By and lots of other places.
More than a how-to book, The Self-Made Stand-Up is an essential resource for developing yourself as an effective comedian. If you’re a comedian, or looking to become one, The Self-Made Stand-Up is the emotional support animal you need.
Sean Cooper, Comedian 