Creating a Comic

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. [↩]

 — Posted by CJ under Creating a Comic. Please comment or trackback!