Humor - Taking Your Jokes to the Next Level

Often as comedians we stop short in the humor writing process. We find the funny and move on. We walk away not realizing the gem that lies waiting just a breath away – that element that will take the joke from funny to genius. I can speak from experience because I've been stuck in a pattern of quitting too soon.

How do I know when I've stopped too soon? Usually my gut is telling me that I found the funny but missed the nugget – an intuition that I have wrapped it up before really cultivating it to the fullest potential. Another way I know is because I see the other comedians who have found their nuggets. I can see their jokes being on a higher level than mine. Sure, I may have found the funny. But they found the funnier.

Think you may have this problem too? Here are some signs that you are stopping too soon:

 You just know it. You have this feeling that you settled for whatever came to you first.

 The joke gets a weak laugh from your audience and you know the concept is funnier than that. You also know that it's too funny to throw it away.

 When you compare your jokes to other comedians' jokes, they fall short.

 Your joke topics fall into that common area shared by other comedians. There is nothing really unique about your joke.

 When you wrote it and came back three days later it wasn't so funny anymore.

 You hear three other people tell pretty much the same joke.

These are just a few signs and I'm thinking if you need any more signs than that I'm not going to be able to convince you in this article.

Okay, so we have a problem? How do we fix it? How do we keep going with our joke? How do we take a joke to the next level? Here is what I've come up with based on my written research, advice from colleagues, and a little soul searching.

 Let your audiences help you. If your jokes are funny enough to use, go ahead and start using them. Then let your audiences tell you what needs to be fixed. This takes time but it works. If I take the time to mingle with my audience after a show, quite often they will come up and tell me ways to improve my jokes, or things that they thought of to add to the joke. I don't take it personally. I've gotten some of my best jokes that way. Let your audiences work for you.

 Walk around it like a crab. Carry the joke idea in your mind for a while. Chew on it, as my uncle Skeeter would say. I usually carry a story idea around in my head for several weeks. Without even being intentional about it, new ideas will come to me until the story idea is much better than if I'd written it when it first came to me.

 Brain Map it. You probably already know what this is, but in case you don't, it's the process of picking your topic apart and finding all related topics. You let your mind go and as you come up with each tangent turn around and find a related topic to that. For example, if your topic is parenting, you would come up with things like childbirth, discipline, toys, potty training, etc. Now you can take those topics and find topics to spin off of them. For example, childbirth could result in: the epidural, what if men had babies, the pictures, who has the worst birthing story, etc. And you can keep going and going and going. You can turn who has the worst birthing story into a competition at a cookout. I have used this process to turn a handful of jokes into a twenty-minute show or a short story. The key here is to let your mind go. Don't look for the funny. Just write.

 Play What-If. Take your topic and ask yourself, What if ….happened? Or what if ….happened? Or what about if …. happened? The key here is to think of unusual things that could happen in your topic. Let's say parenting is your topic. You brain map it and get on the subject of how easy it is to become a parent. What if you had to have a license to be a parent? What if parents could get their licenses revoked? What if you could get your license revoked for doing stupid stuff to embarrass your kids – like wearing black socks and sandals to the beach. What if kids could divorce their parents? Wasn't there a movie about that?

 Insert a Conflict. Things get so much more interesting when a conflict is added to the picture. And how about a second one? And another one? This is the fuel for a good sitcom episode. One mishap is funny. Two is funnier. Three is hilarious.

 What led up to this? Think of what led up to your conflict – the motivations that led to that chain of events.

 Apply other characters and perspectives to your scenarios. What if this happened to someone else? Like the football coach? Or your Sunday school teacher? How would other people see it – people of different ages or cultural backgrounds? You will reach a whole new level of funny if you start running your comedy through the filter of different personalities – especially quirky personalities.

 What and who is going to fix the problem? How could our problem be fixed? Who would do it? What would it look like?

 If it's like this now, what will it be like in the future? Here's a good trigger to get your mind into the process of exaggerating your concept and suspending disbelief.

 What if this happened to me? How would I react?

 Can I relate this to something that is otherwise totally unrelated? Like a lizard with a British accent who sells insurance on commercials.

 Pick up your comedy bit and drop it into another setting. Like kindergarten, a nursing home, Russia, the ghetto, Sunday school, a zoo, etc.

 Swap out animals instead of people.

 Compare out-of-this world to of-this world. Comparing the supernatural to the super normal. Angels and Wal-Mart.

 Group Story. This only works with a group, duh. Start with one person who starts a story. Each person adds on to the story – word by word – or sentence by sentence – until you get to the last person. Good exercise in just seeing what comes out. I heard this is how the GEICO gecko came about.

 Look at the flip side / opposite.

 Can you add dialogue? Act out some conversations as they apply to your topic.

 Weird, Hard, Scary, Stupid. Just in case you've been living in a cave and haven't heard them, these are the four attitude words you apply to your joke. What's weird, hard, scary, or stupid about your topic? Have you tested each word with your topic?

 How are your act outs? Have you looked at how facial gestures and expressions could add to the humor? Sometimes you can get an extra laugh without saying a word.

 Could you write a song about your topic? How would it go?

 How would reporters report about it?

 What would the liberals say about it? The Republicans? Other Movie Stars?

 Have you cut out every unnecessary word?

There you have it. Surely something in here will trigger you to take your joke to the next level. Remember that it takes a lot of writing to come up with something good. And maybe your joke is already as good as it can be. Great. Move on to something else.

I understand that some of these tips will not apply to the joke you are currently working on. But some will. And understand that these are not formulas for writing jokes, they are exercises to get your creative juices kicked up to the next level. By the way, if you have more helpful tips on how to take your joke to the next level, please let me know.

Happy writing!

Humor – Taking the Joke to the Next Level
How to cross over from funny to genius
Part Four in a Four Part Series on Humor
By Kelly Swanson

Sleep Is Creepy!

I recently read an article about a British study that purported to reveal a link between the position a person adopts while sleeping, and their personality. The piece was accompanied by drawings of sleeping men and women in cartoon pajamas. They were curled up in little balls, stretched out like a hippie jumping off a cliff in a Mountain Dew commercial -- and everything in between.

The whole thing triggered a full-body shiver.

There's no way to get around it: sleep is creepy. It's not something I talk about in mixed company, because I'm seemingly alone in these beliefs, but I've always felt this way. I remember being a kid and becoming slightly uncomfortable whenever they showed people in bed on Little House on the Prairie, preparing to turn themselves over to an eight-hour mini­coma (on the prairie). I'm sorry, but the widely accepted nightly ritual of climbing atop an elevated platform and assuming a state of insect-like dormancy is disturbing to me.

The fact that otherwise bright and energetic people willingly allow themselves to become drooling vegetables at the end of each day, feels like a failure. We, as superior animals, should be above such base requirements by now. It's clear that we aren't yet fully evolved, and are nothing more than glorified praying mantises, walking around with delusions of grandeur. Every night, as I climb aboard my raised dormancy platform, I sigh with resignation, feeling like a monkey in pants.

And have you ever seen a person sleeping? They look like idiots. I have no doubt that Albert Einstein himself resembled Gomer Pyle in a gas leak, while drifting off to sleep. As I put a fresh pillow case on my pillow every six months or so, I see the stains there, created by excess saliva that rolled out of my mouth during my nightly transformation into a lobotomized fool, and I feel shame.

This is no way to live, people.

In addition to all the time wasted to voluntary loss of consciousness, I worry that one of these days I'll go in too deep, and won't be able to pull out on the other side. Sleep is Death Lite, and playing chicken with the grim reaper is, I think, ill-advised. Yet we do it every day. So far I've won every contest, but the odds keep getting longer and longer. It's Russian roulette beneath a fluffy comforter.

Most of us seem to be cocky about it, absolutely sure we'll wake up in the morning, but I know better. Tonight could very well be the night that I'm drawn to the light. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take...

And the fact that sleep is not only accepted by society, but also celebrated, concerns me. We should be working at correcting this abnormality. Instead, we continue building homes equipped with special rooms (chambers) in which to assume our freakish science-fiction state of suspended animation, complete with fancy hand-carved hibernation stands.

"How big's your new house?" "Oh, not too big. It has four dormancy chambers, and two waste-elimination alcoves."

We also frequent places of business, like Bed, Bath and Beyond, where one can purchase a whole myriad of frilly, scented dormancy supplies. Dr. Phil might call it "enabling." If we had a grotesque dangling mole on our faces, we'd have it removed, not drive across town to purchase an imported mole cozy. Why are we not seriously endeavoring to eliminate our reliance on the sleep abomination?

Don't even get me started on dreams. When somebody begins a sentence with, "Oh man, I had the weirdest dream last night..." I head for the exit. Thank you for your desire to share, but the bizarre misfirings of your nocturnal brain waves frighten me. You say you were playing Jarts in a jock strap with Willie Mays and Mel from Alice? Well, that's simply excellent.

My wife loves to sleep; she views it as a refuge. She actually looks forward to it, which I find slightly insulting. I'm just the opposite, of course. I put it off as long as possible, and curse its talent for robbing me of one-third of my precious life. Escape can be had with beer and DVDs which, I believe, is highly preferable to wallowing around in heavy fabrics, three feet above the floor. When I finally give in to sleep's evil come-ons, it feels like defeat. Why, if I had an extra seven or eight hours per day, I could rule the world. Or at least watch a shitload of television.

Through history there have been many visionaries who've attempted to circumvent sleep, including Thomas Edison and Kramer, but we generally just accept it as a fact of life. What we need is something that will allow us to stay awake all the time, preferably in an easy-to-swallow tablet, with no adverse physical consequences.

I seem to remember reading a piece on the Internet a while ago, about a half-assed military experiment along those lines. For some reason they want soldiers to be able to stay awake for a week at a time, which seems a tad cruel. But once they get all the bugs worked out, by testing it on gullible college students and whatnot, I'd be interested in getting in on the deal -- far away from the battlefield, of course. It would be like having your weeks Super-Sized.

In the meantime, though, I guess I have no choice but to play along and do my time atop the platform. I do so under protest, however; I want that to be noted.

And in case you're interested, the sleep position I usually adopt is called The Yearner in the British study I mentioned. "People who sleep on their side with both arms out in front are said to have an open nature, but can be suspicious, cynical. They are slow to make up their minds, but once they have taken a decision, they are unlikely ever to change it."

You got that right, bucko. And that's why I'm writing this at 4 a.m.