Failing Forward

Comedy is the definition of failing forward. I would even go out on a limb and say that a comedians whole job, his only job is to fail forward. Because even a Comedy Writing Pro with 40 years of experience won’t be able to tell you definitively if his or her jokes will get a laugh. Or if they will die on their ass. So there is nothing but to try, try and try again. And fail. Fail, fail and fail again. The secret lies in what we do in between failing. A quote which often gets attributed to Albert Einstein - but isn’t - goes like this:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So we won’t.

My clown teacher Philippe Gaulier used to say something along the lines of: “Whenever you get a laugh on stage there has to be an alarm going off in your head telling you: Remember this. Repeat it.”

So our simple rule of rewriting is this:

Keep what works, save what you can and discard the rest.

Now I don’t need to tell you which joke to keep and which to cut. That’s the audiences job. But I can get give you pointers on how to make the time between laughter as short as possible. That means editing your working jokes to make them even stronger and thus hopefully prolonging the laughter and saving what might work.

There are two ways we can try to save a joke:

We forget about it and keep writing new jokes until months or years later we procrastinate and go through our old notebooks where sudden inspiration strikes us on how to make a joke work. I know this sounds time consuming but it is a good way to work because in the meantime your emotional investment will have worn away and you will be able to see your writing for what it is:

Crap.

With the occasional diamond in the rough.

And because we have spent honing our skills writing new jokes we are now able to not only recognize but also polish said diamond in the rough.

The second way to save a joke is to apply what we have learned in the chapter about editing our jokes. Can you compress a joke? Did you hint a the punchline in the first part of the joke? Is the surprise really at the end?

But we should also take a look at what we learned from our Humor Theories. Remember them? I don’t either. Luckily I made us a cheat sheet. HOORAY!