Creating a Comic

When writing a joke, or any other humorous material, try to arrange your punchline in such a way that the funny word goes last.

This is an old axiom among TV comedy writers, and it applies equally well to stand-up comedy. Since the key element in humor is surprise, leaving your funniest and most surprising word until the very end gives your joke the most punch. And you want your punchlines to be as punchy as possible, right?

If you have a joke or story that ends with “and he was eighty-three years old,” for example, drop the unnecessary “years old” at the end. The funny part is that he’s eighty-three, so just end with that.

It’s not always as simple as cutting excess words; very often it’s necessary to rearrange the story in order to put the funny word last. For example…

“I tried to shield my junk, but her kick was too fast for me to block!”

…is notably inferior to:

“And then, out of nowhere, she kicked me right in the junk!”

Junk is a just plain funny word, so that one’s pretty self-explanatory. However, sometimes the funniest word in the punchline isn’t inherently the goofiest word, it’s the word that packs the biggest surprise. I have one punchline that I originally told as follows:

Everyone knows that when you’re on vacation, (stuff) doesn’t count as gay.

Out of context, gay is the funniest word in that sentence, so it wasn’t an entirely stupid mistake on my part. But the funniest part of the joke is actually the word vacation, because that’s where the surprise is embedded. I started getting bigger laughs when I rearranged the punchline to:

Everyone knows that (stuff) doesn’t count as gay… when you’re on vacation.

Sometimes getting the funniest word to the very end requires mangling your point beyond grammatical recognition. Making sense is more important than strict adherence to this rule, so in those cases, just get it as close to the end as possible. Make sure the funny word is in the very last sentence clause, at least.

And remember, if all of your punchlines rely upon extreme vulgarity in the “funny word last” spot, then they’re probably not real punchlines, and you’re probably just being an unfunny foul-mouthed motherfucker.

Related entries on this site:

• How to write a joke: Joke Structure
• Funny stories are not jokes
• Writing for the comedy stage
• New jokes through the wringer
• How to tell if new material is any good

Comics often refer to their various bits and jokes, terms that seem to be used almost interchangeably. “His joke about the beautiful butterflies always kills,” someone might say, or “I can’t decide if her bit about being a squirter is hilarious or just disturbing.” So what’s the difference between a bit and a joke?

The distinction is subtle, enough so that I’ve been accused of splitting hairs by making it — and in fairness, it took me a year’s worth of immersion in stand-up before I recognized it. But there is definitely a noticeable difference: bits include a series of punchlines that are all embedded within a longer narrative, whereas jokes are shorter and stand on their own.

Jokes: short and punchy

The basic structure of a joke is simple: setup, punchline, laugh. Tags, or additional punchlines, may follow. Jokes are short, punchy, memorable, and easy to tell to your friends because they don’t rely on a larger narrative. Comedians who primarily tell old-fashioned jokes include Mitch Hedberg, Demetri Martin, Gilbert Gottfried, Stephen Wright, Anthony Jeselnik and Jimmy Carr:

Joke-oriented comics in Seattle include Ross Parsons, Andy Palmer, and Barbara Holm, all very funny people whose acts are worth making an effort to see.

Bits: narratives with punchlines

Bits, on the other hand, are collections of related jokes strung together in the form of a story or rant. They still adhere to the basic physics of joke structure — setup, punchline, tag — but each punchline is embedded in a larger narrative, and wouldn’t make sense in isolation. David Letterman’s top ten list is a bit that contains ten different jokes.

My favorite example of extended bits is the material that Chris Rock includes in the middle of his acts, the searing social critiques (i.e. “rich” versus “wealthy”) that he sandwiches between crowd-pleasing raunchy material. Along with Rock, well-known comics whose acts are primarily filled with bits include Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, Dane Cook, Patton Oswalt, and Bill Burr:

Fantastic Seattle comics whose material is largely based around funny bits include Mike Cummings, Brian Boshes, Jen Seaman, and Andrew Rivers.

Comedy envy

There are two unassailable truths about the bit/joke dichotomy: (1) Neither format is qualitatively better than the other; it’s really just a matter of formatting. Funny is funny, just as delicious food tastes delicious regardless of whether you take it home from the store in paper or plastic. (2) Comics who are comfortable writing in one style invariably envy the writing style of The Other. What comes naturally to us often seems less impressive than what doesn’t.

As an example of that point: Chris Rock and Louis CK are my two favorite stand-up comedians, and their sets consist almost entirely of bits, including some bits that are so intricate they go on for a full twenty minutes. Both of them are famous and successful comedians, yet here they both are, in awe of the more purely joke-writing stylings of Mitch Hedberg:

Years ago, Chris Rock and I were writing a shitty movie together. We were talking about comedians. We went to Mitch Hedberg’s site (this is before he died) and watched one of his Letterman sets. At the time, Chris and I were (and are) both wind-bag, stage-stalking, hammer a premise to the ground comics. We watched Mitch, who just fired beautiful fastballs one after the other. Joke joke joke. All solid. All amazing. Non-stop. Five minutes of it. We were in awe of it. Much respect to Mitch Hedberg.

Most comics do some of both. While Mitch primarily told jokes, he also did some bits — like the hilarious DuFrenes bit (located halfway down this page). But have you ever tried to find one of Mitch’s jokes based on his CD track titles? It’s virtually impossible for most of his material, because the title often refers to a single 30-second joke sandwiched in between a dozen other unrelated jokes.

Self-diagnosis: not pithy

This is true for me, too. Since my own comedy is mostly based around bits, I get super excited on the rare occasion when I come up with a pure joke-joke. That pithy style of writing is just not how I’m wired¹, whereas the flow of a bit comes to me a lot more naturally. My fifteen minute act contains maybe one minute’s worth of straightforward jokes.

So how is this useful, then, this distinction between bits and jokes? It really isn’t, in any practical sense. It’s vaguely helpful when referring to material; being able to precisely refer to “that bit” or “that joke,” for example. But not really. Mostly it’s the kind of navel-gazing, circle-jerk topic that comics spend endless amounts of time arguing about backstage — and writing about on their blogs.

1. Some might say that’s because I’m too wordy, and would point to this blog as evidence. I wouldn’t argue. [↩]

Bald eagle in Edmonds: actual photo

For the last month there’s been a small group of bald eagles hanging around in the city where I both work (at my day job) and live. I am actually staring out the window at one, right now, as I type this. It’s perched on one of those wooden beams that sticks up out of the water, about 300 yards from the shore. It looks ridiculously noble and distinguished.

Nobody else around here seems to be very excited about this. I am very excited about this. As any fan of Stephen Colbert will tell you, bald eagles are pure, undistilled patriotic awesomeness.

The other night, a few of us were talking backstage about Jeff Dunham; specifically, whether his act could be characterized as little more than racism with puppets. That debate, like most of its kind, is unresolved and ongoing.

The conversation segued to the general topic of racial humor, and we spent a little while feeling sorry for ourselves over how politically correct Seattle audiences tend to be. Then my friend Dan Sapegin told us about this online clip from Daniel Tosh, host of Comedy Central’s Tosh.0:

So, is it racist? Uh, yeah, pretty much (you can vote in their online poll). But it doesn’t really seem malicious, and it’s pretty funny. Does that make it OK? The debate continues…

The most significant fact of the 20th century will be that the North Americans speak English.

I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about the English language these days.

I recently watched a fantastic BBC program — I think those fruits would call it a programme — called The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language (link goes to the first full episode). It tells the story of English as though it were a person, starting with the language’s Germanic origins as the crumbling Roman Empire receded and Flemish tribes migrated to Britain. From there, English adapted through a succession of Danish and Viking invasions that altered and nearly eradicated it, followed by a massive infusion of French during the Norman occupation, and then it variously co-opted and shamelessly stole words from Welsh, Gaelic, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Arabic, Indian¹, Carribean, and Native American sources, among others, on its way to becoming the international lingua franca.

The fact that English is such a pastiche of other languages makes it difficult to learn, if it’s not your first tongue. The flip side of that coin is its vast vocabulary, which allows us to express ourselves in wonderfully precise and varied ways.

I think we take for granted, sometimes, just how many shadings of meaning we can deploy by finding the right words. For example, I could describe myself as happy, and that would get the basic point across. But English also gifts us with dozens of words that mean the same basic thing, with subtle yet important differences. I could also describe myself as being content, which is very different than if I’m feeling ecstatic — or cheerful, sanguine, peppy, grateful, or exultant.

One of my other favorite examples² comes from the synonyms for the word alone. We could also say solitary or isolated and in both cases, we mean very different things. Solitary has the sound of a sort of voluntary nobility, a whiff of the heroic. Thoreau was a solitary figure at Walden pond. Isolated, on the other hand, sounds involuntary and a little sad – maybe even pathetic. The Unabomber nursed his deranged grievances in isolation, not in solitude.

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about comedy?

The richness of the English language is a bounty for comedians, because we can almost always find a funnier word to get our point across.

For example, the words dick and cock are perfectly serviceable ways to reference male genitalia, but the old fashioned penis (or slang peener) often sounds funnier up on stage. Dong is even funnier, and so far wang has given me the best mileage out of all of them, substituted into the exact same jokes. Groin linguistics!

1. The word “jungle,” among many others, is originally from India. So is “bandanna.” [↩]
2. I didn’t come up with this example myself, but nor can I remember who I heard it from. John August, maybe? [↩]