by John Vorhaus
Also, be aware that I’m not speaking only of stand-up comics and live audiences here. If you’re writing comedy on the page, or drawing cartoons, you have to be that much more rigorous in assuring that your material won’t fade. Go for the cheap topical reference and you’re only planting the seeds of your own destruction. Great Flood of ‘93. See what I mean?
What will an audience accept? This gets into questions of taste and taboos, propriety and political correctness. For example, do you remember when drugs were funny? In the early 1980s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a TV sitcom episode about cocaine or marijuana. Hilarious stuff. By the early 1990s, drugs were passe, and anyone pitching drug humor in a network sitcom story meeting was asking for a quick ticket to the parking lot.
Things change. Tastes change. You have to change with the times.
Does this mean you should seek not to offend? Of course not. Your humor is your humor, and one man’s offense is another man’s boffo gag. It’s okay to offend part of your audience if you connect with another part. If you offend too many and amuse too few, though, you’ll have no audience at all. And humor requires an audience.
It’s okay if some people really hate your stuff. That means they feel strongly about it, and this admits the possibility that others will love it just as strongly. The place you want to avoid is the vast, bland middle ground where your humor is safe, innocuous, offensive to no one-and thus compelling to no one. You want your humor to move people, and that won’t happen unless your choices are bold.
So don’t be afraid to offend. In fact, you can tum offense to your advantage. Consider the stand-up comic who attacks and insults a heckler. Sure, he offends the heckler, but in so doing he creates a strong bond between himself and the rest of the audience. It’s an “us versus him” mentality, what we might call the Saddam Hussein effect: The best way to unify a people is to give them a common enemy. That heckler is the audience’s common enemy, and the comic who attacks the heckler can be as brutal as he wants to the heckler without losing his audience.
You might write a comic essay attacking, oh, say, insurance salesmen. You can say what you like about insurance salesmen (“As if life insurance worked . . . “) because your audience is not insurance salesmen, but rather the hapless victims of same. You and your audience are unified against the common enemy. They’ll accept anything you dish out.
Just don’t try publishing that essay in Insurance Salesmen’s Quarterly.
As an exercise, pick something or someone that really, really bugs you-taxes, family, bad driving, how-to books—and attack it in the form of a comic essay. Be as brutal and offensive as possible. But be careful who you show it to. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.
In the end, of course, you have to please yourself. So always make sure that your humor delights that most important audience of one. If you genuinely find your stuff funny, chances are that a certain fixed percentage of the rest of the world will, too. And hey, if they don’t like it, the worst they can do is ignore you. Or possibly hang you. Really, what’ve you got to lose?
YOUR COMIC VOCABULARY
Not every joke you think of is useful to you now. A lot of good jokes get scrapped in the service of a stronger story. Many comic notions show great promise but can’t stand the weight of development. Sometimes you’re just ahead of an audience’s understanding. In the course of your career, you’ll collect quite a lot of this comic flotsam. Start saving it now. Consider it to be the great tinfoil ball of your life. Anything becomes valuable if you hold onto it long enough.
I have a file labeled “1001 Clever Things I Thought Up Myself or Stole From a Few Close, Personal Friends.” Into this file goes funny stuff for which I can find no current use: jokes written on napkins (“Coffee is better than sex because you can have more coffee right away”), words of wisdom (“The rules don’t confine, they define”), inspirational slogans (“Self-indulgence is its own reward”), oxymorons, funny names, ear tickles, etc. Is this stuff worth saving? At worst, it takes up (minimal) space on my hard disk. At best, it all contributes to a valuable resource called my comic vocabulary.
Items in my comic vocabulary may lie fallow for years before finding new lives and new homes in stories or scripts or stand-up routines or one-panel cartoons. When I’m stuck for an idea or a joke, I go back and review my comic vocabulary. Maybe I’ll find something directly useful, or maybe I’ll stumble across something that triggers a new idea. Maybe the mere act of reading old jokes (or things I once thought were jokes) will set my mind thinking in productive new ways. My comic vocabulary is both an inventory and a stimulus. So’s yours.
Start now to build your comic vocabulary. Get in the habit of writing down the funny things you say or think. Don’t worry if they don’t look funny on the page, for your comic vocabulary is a very private file that no one else will see (until, perhaps, after you’re dead, and then, really, what will you care?). Also don’t worry if these bits lack structure or context. After all, if they had structure and context, you’d have used them somewhere else already.
As a discipline, try to add five or ten new jokes or jokoids to the file every day. You’ll have a formidable storehouse of collected wit (or half-collected half-wit) a lot sooner than you think.
THE WADE BOGGS PARADIGM
Wade Boggs used to play third base for the Boston Red Sox (and parenthetically, if you want to know about comedy, truth, and pain, try being a Red Sox fan in this lifetime). Wade Boggs had a staggering batting average. He hit over .300 every year and was arguably the best pure hitter in baseball.
And he took batting practice every day. The best pure hitter in baseball felt the need to step into the batting cage every day and do the grunt-work of his craft.
Now look, you and I aren’t as good at making comedy as Wade Boggs was at hitting a baseball. Never will be. And yet we don’t practice our craft every day. Somehow we’ve gotten it into our heads that we don’t have to. The purpose of the Wade Boggs Paradigm is to remind us that we do. It’s like this: If Wade Boggs practices, and he’s better than we are, then it stands to reason that we could stand to practice, too.
This is not bad news. Because when we practice our craft, we not only get better at it, we also build up a body of work, stuff we can use to impress our parents, make our friends laugh, possibly even sell one day. But this all only happens if we plant our butts in our chairs, or grab that cartooning pen, or stand up there on that cold, dark stage and do it. Wouldn’t you like to be as good as Wade Boggs? It’s like that old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall. “Practice, son, practice.”
If you’re not the comic creator you want to be, I’m willing to bet that it’s not because you aren’t funny. Hell, if you genuinely weren’t funny, I think you’d know it, and you wouldn’t want to be a comic creator in the first place. Nor would you have swapped hard currency for this book. If you’re not as funny as you want to be, perhaps you’re not working hard enough. But rest assured that someone else out there is working hard enough, working twice as hard as you. If you want to be successful, you’re going to have to take a lot more batting practice than you ever imagined. And you’re never going to stop, not even when you become successful. Because as soon as you stop practicing, your skills begin to fade.
So how do you practice comedy? Easy. If you’re a writer, you write. If you’re a cartoonist, you draw cartoons. If you’re a comic actor, you act comically. If you’re a comic photographer, you take funny photographs. No, check that, you take lots and lots and lots of photographs and hope and trust that some small number of them will develop into a chuckle or two. Remember, even a .300 hitter makes an out twice as often as he gets a hit. Embrace failure and make practice part of your routine. If it’s good enough for Wade Boggs, it’s certainly good enough for us.
Oh, and look on the bright side: at least you’re not a Red Sox fan. Oh you are? Oh dear . . .
PROBLEM SETS
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How do you make a joke? How do you physically, actually, cognitively create a comic moment out of metaphorical thin air? Do you just sit under the apple tree and wait for joke-fruit to bop you on the head? Not unless you’ve got more time and patience than common sense. Here’s a different strategy: Treat the joke as a problem to be solved.
Sometimes this requires nothing more than applying a tool to a situation. You can, for instance, apply clash of context to a ghost town and get a Manhattan nightclub or an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Mojave Desert. You can apply exaggeration to a late-night television commercial and find a line like, “If you act now, we’ll include the entire state of Rhode Island at no extra charge!” You can attach a wildly inappropriate response to a high-school pep rally and get the cheerleaders doing a striptease or the band playing a funeral dirge. You can bend a common phrase and discover the difference between an optimist and a pessimist:
An optimist looks at the glass and says it’s half full. A pessimist looks at the glass and says, “If I drink this, I’ll probably spill it all over myself and ruin my shirt.”
Once you get good at this trick, it’s like juggling; it’s subconscious and automatic. And then you can get even more sophisticated and complex in the construction of your problem sets.
Suppose I want to invent some comic phobias. First I construct the problem set. I find that this set has four parts:
1) What is a trivial or absurd fear?
2) What word for that fear sounds good with the -phobia suffix?
3) Is my solution likely to be understood by most readers or viewers or listeners?
4) Does my definition twist or amplify the meaning of the phobia?
Here are some possible solutions to this problem:
Anachrophobia, fear of being out-of-date.
Philatophobia, fear of stamp collectors.
Metaphorophobia, fear of poetic allusions.
Pedestrophobia, fear of walking things.
Prophylactophobia, fear of contraceptive sheaths.
Chihuahuaphobia, fear of yapping small dogs.
Pterydactophobia, fear of flying dinosaurs.
Intoxiphobia, fear of obnoxious drunks.
Bibliophobia, fear of the Dewey Decimal System.
Doughnophobia, fear of fattening breakfast treats.
When I solve for all four parts of the problem set, the joke works, but if I solve for three parts or less, the joke fails. If I say agoraphobia, I’m dealing with a real fear, the fear of crossing open spaces, and not a trivial or absurd one, so that won’t work. If I say, “Agraphaphobia, fear of early Christian writings,” the word sounds fine but the meaning will be lost on the majority of readers or viewers. If I say, “Angoraphobia, fear of angora sweaters,” the fear is trivial, the word sounds fine, the joke is understandable, but the definition doesn’t change or amplify the meaning.
Note that you get a little extra bounce out of the joke if it also has an ear tickle, if it sounds like an authentic, pre-existing phobia, as anachrophoba to arachnophobia. But since it’s not vital that the joke also tickle the ear, the need for an ear tickle is not part of the problem set.
If this seems way too analytical, well maybe it is. A lot of this process happens automatically, and let’s face it, you don’t need to know how a watch works in order to tell time. But when you’re stuck and you don’t know where else to turn for a comic idea, it’s useful to have structure to fall back on, and thinking of jokes in terms of problems and their solutions is a reliable application of structure.
As an exercise, generate a list of comic “-holies” (scotchoholic, shopoholic, aquaholic, etc.). First, list the terms of your problem set, and then come up with solutions that meet those terms. Then do another exercise where you pose both the problem and the terms of its solution.
The strategy of using problem sets to generate jokes is especially effective when you use the rule of nine and the power of the list, because it’s a little mechanical and you don’t always get great results. Such is the nature of tools.
LEAPLETS
This is just a pep-rally paragraph, folks. Any time you’re frustrated in your ability to use tools, or write jokes, or draw cartoons, or win an audience, or overcome your ego blocks, remember that progress is made in small steps. Creatively, we grow not in leaps but in leaplets. Moving forward slowly is moving forward just the same. Don’t expect more of yourself and your tools than they can give you now. Make the best of what you’ve got and don’t drive yourself nuts.
16
Homilies and Exhortations
I started this book by talking about math class. Throughout the text, I’ve drawn connections between comedy and arithmetic, comedy and geometry, comedy and quantum mechanics, what-have-you. Now, as we hurtle toward the end, I’d like to introduce one last chunk of pseudo-science, a formula that applies not only to comic writers or artists or performers but to anyone striving to succeed in any field of endeavor. Maybe even in life. Here it is:
TALENT + DRIVE + TIME = SUCCESS
People want to know if they have enough talent to succeed. They seem to think that talent is like S&H Green Stamps—collect enough talent points and you can redeem them for a toaster. Do you have enough talent to succeed? I believe you do. I believe we all do. It’s part of our genetic package, like the pancreas or a fear of falling. Talent, the gift of creation, is, in a sense, what separates us from the lichens and squids.
This is not to say that everyone can be a brilliant comedian, any more than everyone can play Brahms with a blindfold or nail a triple pike with a back half-twist at the Olympics. But everyone has talent. It comes with the territory.
So yes, you do have talent. But talent is only one part of the equation. To parlay your talent into success, you have to apply hard work, practice, patience, perseverance, and relentless pursuit of your goals: in sum, drive.
I know many superbly talented writers, for example, who don’t get work because they don’t have drive. They don’t flog themselves to achieve day in and day out, and eventually they just drop out of the race and go sell cars or something. I’d hate like hell to see that happen to you.
So don’t ask yourself if you have enough talent; rather, ask if you have enough drive. Do you have the sticktoitiveness to keep pounding away at the word processor or uncapping that drawing pen or dragging yourself up on stage, day after day, week and month after year after decade? If you don’t, you might as well go sell cars now because, absent a lightning strike of extraordinary good fortune, you’ll never be successful.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that you still have time. You have lots and lots of time. Twenty-four hours of it every day. That’s an incredibly lot of time in which to get an incredibly lot of work done. While you’re still alive and walking around on the planet, you still have time to make your dreams come true. But while it’s true that you have more time than you imagine, it’s also true that time is your one non-renewable resource. Eventually, alas, time does run out. Time is ours to spend, then, but not to waste.
So here’s the math: talent+ drive+ time; apply sufficient drive to your manifest talent over time and you will succeed. That’s my bright promise to you. But there’s a catch. You don’t just need drive, you need sufficient drive.
How much drive is sufficient drive? It’s not realistic to expect someone suddenly to turn their lives over to the perfect pursuit of comedy. We all have friends and loved ones, jobs and interests, hobbies and obligations, all of which compete for our time and our attention. Where, then, do we find the energy and motivation to move forward toward our goals? How do we construct a comic creator’s life in the context of a busy person’s life? It ain’t easy. Here’s the path I take.
I think of the journey toward my writing goals as a trip down a long road. I can’t see the end of the road. I can’t be sure there even is an end to the road. And I have no cert
ain expectation of ever arriving there. What, then, do I know for sure? I know that, with every step I take, I’m moving farther from the beginning. I may never reach the end of the road, but I can always get farther from the start. Just as I focus on process, not product, I also bend my attention to journey, not destination. This twist sets me free, for it gives me success in process every single day. That fuels my drive, which moves me faster down the road, which increases my measure of success, which further fuels my drive, and so on.
What opposes drive? Fear, mostly. Fear of failure. If you put that manuscript in the mail, you might get rejected. If you go up on stage, you might bomb. If you try to be funny, you might get ignored. Fear is your single strongest disincentive, and though I’ve tried to give you some strategies for facing fear in this book, in the end that’s a battle you have to fight alone. Fight it as aggressively and consciously as possible.
I try to practice patience and impatience simultaneously. I know that there will be days when fear or disincentive or just plain laziness will win out, and on those days I won’t get a damn thing done. I can accept those days if I know that yesterday I was productive, and tomorrow (or the next day) I’ll be productive again. I take the long view of my career to grant myself patience and the short view of my career to imbue myself with drive. In other words, I try to put myself on the spot and let myself off the hook at the same time.
Creativity, especially comic creativity, is not a constant force. We’re never as productive as we want to be or feel we should be, and no matter how much we apply tools to the comic process, there are still powers at work beyond our control. Some days the river runs dry. Those are good days to go to the movies.
Because life is long, and time is plentiful, and because talent is yours by right of birth, you have the means to achieve your dreams—if you have the drive. Do you have the drive? There’s only one person who can answer that question, and it ain’t the guy who wrote this book.