It’s already too late for 100%
That last bit of comedy advice from Thomas was quite popular, so here’s another one I like. Thomas does mostly one-liners. And therefore his advice may be mostly for comedians alike — still it’s something to think about for everyone.
Thomas writes a lot of jokes when he’s developing new material. And I mean a really fucking impressive lot of jokes. This tuesday he showed up for the open mic at a café in Århus with 81 completely new ones. Eighty one. And in about 15 minutes on stage he hammered through them all, recording his performance to later determine what worked and what didn’t.
Of course many of those jokes turned out to not get the laughs he expected. He may not have sold the idea well enough or it might just have bin too plain silly. But that’s to be expected when you go for quantity over quality. As Thomas once told me: I don’t know what’s funny so I try a lot and let the audiences decide.
Now the real advice. If your new joke doesn’t work the first time around, trash it. It’s already too late for it to have worked 100% of times. Statistically this is true.
In effect this means that if your joke doesn’t work the first time you try it, don’t bother doing it again, because if it doesn’t work the first time around, it will probably never be fantastic. And there’s no reason to settle with okay jokes.
And while this might seem dramatic for some, it’s the advice that when I followed it in my (very) early days of writing and doing my first jokes, made my performance turn from okay to better.
…
These days I don’t immediately trash an idea, if it fails or it doesn’t get the amount of laughs I want it to get. And I don’t think you should either. But I know I will have to change something in my telling of it and not just keep on trying and failing. Because there’s no reason to settle with okay jokes.
