I think I should just admit, upfront, that this post is mostly just an excuse to shamelessly mention that I got to meet Rick Steves and Gene Openshaw on Friday night at the Edmonds International Film Festival.¹

I met and chatted with them about the writerly craft, over a beer, and these two bestselling authors even indulged me in a brief discussion about comedic writing!

The obligatory tie-in to standup comedy

Stand-up comedy’s instantaneous audience feedback is both its best and worst feature. You go up on stage, tell your joke, and then either bask in the warm glow of triumph (“I killed”) or endure soul-flaying rejection (“I died”). It’s thrilling, and visceral, and often quite bewildering — and always, always immediate.

In contrast, Rick and Gene talked about how it’s difficult to get feedback on the humorous parts of their books and TV shows. The mass market audience is at the other end of the media spectrum from live performances; it’s enormously broad, but it has no way of giving feedback on specific jokes. How many of the millions of people who see the Oslo special will laugh at the wry aside about the Norwegian military? It could be a hundred… or a hundred thousand.

Gene Openshaw

And then there’s the process delay with book publishing and TV production, in which it takes months or even years to close the feedback loop with the audience…

Presenting or screening their work before a live audience is an excellent way to reap the benefits of both, and Rick does a lot of public speaking. He’s not a comedian, of course, but his classes and presentations are full of funny observations delivered in a natural, spontaneous-seeming style — which is to say that in addition to his superb craftsmanship with language, Rick Steves is a talented performer, too. The quasi-illusion of conversational delivery is one of the crucial Ingredients of Funny, and it’s way harder than it looks.²

A brief note about how Rick Steves changed my life

Measured by a ratio of dollars spent to enjoyment received, the three Rick Steves travel guides that I carried across Europe might be the greatest investment I’ve ever made. Seriously, they’re that valuable just for all the sightseeing pointers you could ever want: stuff like “avoid this, make sure to see that,” and so on.

But on a more fundamental level, reading about and then living Rick’s travel philosophy changed how I think about my interactions with the world around me. His attitude on traveling in foreign lands is remarkably similar to Impov’s Rule #1: “Always say ‘Yes!’”

Very crudely summarized, he encourages an attitude of cheerful adventurousness, urging travelers to celebrate cultural differences, plunge into the unknown, and welcome temporary discomfort as an opportunity for growth. Or as he likes to say: “Fear is for people who don’t get out much.”

The only downside to the whole wonderful experience was a faux pas I made after Rick introduced me to Gene. It quickly passed, but will be a fun story to flagellate myself with some other day…

1. As with the Bellingham “International” Airport, the token participation of a few Canucks apparently qualifies something as a globe-bestriding colossus.
2. It’s probably best not to dwell on how talented Rick is in so many different areas, because people like that are frankly a little bit annoying.

In fact, every joke is basically a short story — even one-liners — and our strongest, most visceral reactions come when we relate to the emotions behind the story. That’s why puns and other straight-up wordplay merely makes us chuckle, while someone making an absurd fool of themselves can unleash our bladder. Try to heighten the emotional conflict wherever possible.

I was recently in a brainstorming meeting with a group of talented local comedy writers and actors, preparing for an upcoming comedy show that will include live sketches. Eventually the time came for the writers to divvy up rough draft assignments from the sketch ideas on the whiteboard.

The premise for one of the sketches was Parents fighting at a toddler’s birthday party and using silly euphemisms instead of curse words. The writer who volunteered to write it made a comment that assumed the parents would be divorced. “Oh, I didn’t think they’re necessarily divorced…” said the person who originally pitched the idea, and we proceeded to have an interesting back-and-forth about whether or not the parents were, for the purposes of this sketch, divorced.

To me the answer was blindingly obvious: of course the parents are divorced! Think of all the emotional shorthand you get to cram into the setup with just that simple detail — the seething resentment, the bitter history with the extended family, the conflicting prerogatives for the future¹. There are so many jokes and insults available for a divorced couple who hate each other that simply wouldn’t work for a married couple who has to go home together at night. It might not be pretty, but it sure can be funny.

1. Yes, there are plenty of perfectly amicable divorces that don’t involve any of this — believe me, I know — but we’re painting with a broad brush, here.

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?