Creating a Comic

Sometimes good things come in small packages. Such is the case with the Discographies Twitter feed, “a definitive guide to an artist’s body of work (studio albums only) in 140 characters.”

It’s pretty amusing. Here’s a sample:

Rage Against The Machine: 1-3 (thud-thud! sqwee!) Noam Chomsky, motherfuckers! (sqwee!); 4 carbon footprint reduced by recycling old songs.

Weezer: 1 “Remember that nerdy guy from high school?” 2 “The one who couldn’t talk to girls?” 3-7 “Why are you still hanging out with him?”

Eric Clapton: 1-8, 11-18 displays of “chops,” uninspired blues shuffles, mid-tempo choogle, shitty songwriting; 9-10 and Phil Collins, too!

Does all this social media stuff just sound like randomly babbled jargon to you, but you know you need a Web 2.0 strategy of some sort? Then here’s the site for you: What the Fuck Is My Social Media “Strategy”?

I’ve been on Twitter for a while (follow me!) and my own strategy appears to be “use social media as a shiny distraction while avoiding other, more important things.” It’s a game-changing enterprise-wide paradigm shift.

Are you watching Louie, the new show by stand-up comedian Louis C.K.? It’s on FX on… some night. I’ll check… seriously, does anyone still watch TV when it’s actually on?¹ … There it is: Tuesdays at 11pm.

The show has been compared to Seinfeld, which is a lame and reductive comparison. It’s true that both shows are based around the lives of comedians, both feature bits of stand-up, and both are set in New York.

But where Seinfeld was a traditional multi-camera sitcom with 30 minute storylines and a regular cast and so forth, Louie is very much not that; it’s a combination of Louis CK’s hilarious stand-up, intermixed with various short films based loosely on his real life. Shorts like this one:

Some of it’s just playful goofing around, like this short film featuring a brilliantly filthy cameo from Ricky Gervais, stealing the crown from Dr. Nick as the Worst Doctor Ever.

1. I watch plenty of TV, but now that Lost is over I have no idea when anything’s actually on. Do you still watch TV when it actually airs? Do you also fly a zeppelin to work and weave your own clothes and browse the Web with Internet Explorer, Grandpa? [↩]

Only a few hours after my last post about joke brainstorming, I found myself reading this interview with Ira Glass, where the host of This American Life makes a similar point about success through failure (emphasis below is mine):

I had this experience a couple of years ago where I got to sit in on the editorial meeting at The Onion. Every Monday they have to come up with like 17 or 18 headlines, and to do that, they generate 600 headlines per week. I feel like that’s why it’s good: because they are willing to be wrong 583 times to be right 17.

It kind of gives you hope. If you do creative work, there’s a sense that inspiration is this fairy dust that gets dropped on you, when in fact you can just manufacture inspiration through sheer brute force. You can simply produce enough material that the thing will arrive that seems inspired.¹

The only way to become good at something is to first be really bad at it, a lot. Embrace failure! Write a whole lot of shitty jokes!

1. The whole interview is from this fascinating interview series based on the book called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. [↩]

I recently started learning to play the piano, which means that I currently suck out loud in neighbor-terrorizing fashion. On the way to my lesson today, I psyched myself up by repeating the simple trick for learning anything: embrace failure. We can’t be good at something until we’ve first spent a lot of time being really bad at it.

Writing jokes is no different. If you follow simple joke structure, then writing a joke is easy. Writing a funny joke is much harder, but the path to a good joke lies through a huge pile of bad jokes.

So in the spirit of embracing failure, and sharing how the process works, I just spent ten minutes brainstorming jokes about my pathetic musical ability. These are the coherent minority that resulted; they’re not very good jokes, but that’s the point:

For me, playing the piano is a lot like sex: I’m clumsy, my rhythm sucks, and I keep putting my fingers in the wrong place.

Forget Beethoven or Billy Joel; I can’t even play Chopsticks. After a few minutes of fumbling, I get exasperated and play “Just Give Me a Goddamn Fork.”
(Tag: Even white people can play that one.)

My music really is atrocious. I fill a room with more terrible notes than a meeting with TV executives.

I actually sound a lot like Michael Jackson… looked.

If I really want to be like Elton John then I should probably just stick to the meat flute.

I also spent a few minutes on wordplay premises that never quite panned out, playing around with “chords” and “scales.” Is there a fish joke here? I wondered. Then my inner 12yo started repeating “smells like tuna” and doing the Beavis-laugh which just… wasn’t productive.¹ Your ideas are welcome in the comments.

Sifting the rubble after a brainstorm

To me, the only clear keeper is the joke at the end. Elton John is a bit of a fogie reference, but I think the right delivery could score a touchdown with that one.

Low-hanging fruit

You’ll notice that most of these first-draft jokes use very well-worn premises: (x) is like sex or a reference to Michael Jackson or whatever. This is normal for the start of a brainstorm, where the goal is volume: quantity over quality. Originality can come later. It’s easier to blaze a new trail after you’ve already been hiking for a while.

If I were serious about making these jokes into a bit,² then the next step would be to play around with each premise and try to make it more original and/or more surprising. Funnier, in other words.

For example, there’s that joke about the TV execs, which is no good at all because it’s totally unrelateable. But the play on “notes” is worth exploring; a more promising pathway might involve the notes passed between schoolchildren. As I just typed that, I thought and maybe also change “terrible” to “retarded” and make it about retarded schoolkids? Hmm:

I fill a room with more retarded notes than a day of homeschooling with the Palins.

Still not very good — too tortured, too topical, too politically polarizing — but it’s an improvement. I’d keep working with this premise for a while, trying other ‘retard’ ideas and then exploring different avenues entirely: something about Post-Its, maybe? Change ‘retarded’ to ‘incomprehensible’ notes? or ‘false’ notes? or ‘grace’ notes? CliffsNotes? And so on.

At some point you’re going to run out of time and energy, and it’s just not going to get any better. That’s OK! One of the neat things about writing is how our subconscious takes the task on, too. It’ll get to work on a premise and then, maybe a week or month or year later, out of nowhere, bam! An amazing new punchline will just burst into your head.

This is why it’s important to always write down and save everything, even the crappiest crap. The more crap you generate, the more likely it is that some of it will eventually turn into comedy gold.

1. Trying to write with ADHD can be a lot like trying to put an octopus to bed. [↩]
2. It was a useful exercise, but unless I had a specific reason for needing a bit about my (lack of) ability to play music, this is where I’d shelve it. I can always come back to it later, and for now I have a lot of much stronger material that’s waiting for stage time. [↩]

Having spent the past year as an aspiring — fancytalk for unpaid — stand-up comedian, with only a part-time job during the day, the only medical plan I had was “take an aspirin, rub some dirt on it, and stop being such a pussy.”

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Washington State has a new healthcare program that lets residents buy into a medical plan that’s relatively inexpensive — here’s the premium estimator, which has exactly two questions. The intent of the program is to tide the currently uninsured over until the federal socialized Barack Hussein Hitlercare Death Panel Act kicks in for everyone¹ in 2014.

A grim reaper… in white? WTF? So many questions! Are death panels full of endearingly wacky hijinx like Spy vs Spy? Did the one on the left have a bleaching mishap? Or maybe he died fighting a Balrog but got revived for the photo session? Perhaps it’s about racial unity? Or the opposite, some sort of dig against affirmative action? Did the guy who already owned KKK robes just go “Enh, close enough”?

It’s called the Washington Health Program and yeah, I know: it sounds too good to be true. But I just signed up for it myself, and so far no Nigerians of royal descent have hounded me for bank info or demanded an organ or fingered my prostate or anything. (Yet. Hope springs eternal.) The whole qualification and enrollment process took about three weeks, which is astonishingly efficient work from the same government that runs our ferry system.

Anyway, I generally try to keep my politics out of this blog, but I do actually have certain very strongly held political views. One of these strident policy beliefs of mine is that I, personally, should not die. Preferably ever, but at least not soon. So this feels like progress, and I don’t care which political party gets the credit for it, so long as robot butlers are next on the agenda. (And btw, if your political views happen to differ on the question of me continuing to live, hopefully we can just agree to disagree. But if you really feel the need to “get involved,” then you should probably take your best shot before my September 1 healthcare enrollment renders me invulnerable to weaponry.)

I am also a fan of cheap pharmaceuticals, at least theoretically; it’s been a few years since I could afford anything other than the aforementioned aspirin. But generic drugs are only $10 under the Washington Health Program, so I think I’m going to do some Internet research and reverse engineer myself a plausible diagnoses or five. It’ll be like an episode of House in reverse, resulting in the taxpayers of Washington State² subsidizing my four-hour cast-iron SUPERBONERS.

1. Approximately [↩]
2. A category of citizen which theoretically includes all of Washington’s working road comics, each of whom diligently declares their cash income from each booking during the proper–BWAHAHAHAHA… oh man, now that’s funny. [↩]