3. Search for the Idea

Now after you have successfully gathered tons and tons of information and opinions and stories based on your topic let’s search for the Joke Idea.

This is the part of the process which is very personal, murky and potentially the most fun AND most frustrating. You have to let your imagination run wild and trust your comedy instincts.

This is where the magic happens. This is where you happen.

Also this is also the point in the process where anything can happen and it is ok! Let it.

You might find jokes, Joke Ideas, new Joke Problems, you might stumble upon a Topic that fascinates you more than what you are working on right now. You might think of Jokes and Joke Ideas that have nothing to do with your Topic. Let it happen. This is your process and it is important not to judge while exploring. Just write it down and come up with more stuff.

Additionally while you are looking for an idea isn’t the time for your inner critic to perk up. You can’t be creative AND judge your thoughts at the same time. Simply put: You can’t think about what you’re doing and also be doing it at your best. So we split it up. First we write and only later we will look at what we have written. Now we are letting our minds go wild and come up with all kinds of stuff that won’t work. But that is ok. We need just one joke to make it all worth it. Think of the rest as fertilizer that got you to that one working idea.

Or as Ed Sheeran put it: In the beginning creativity is like a water tap that hasn’t been used in quite some time. You have to let all the stale and murky water run out until it becomes clear.

But it isn’t just sitting there waiting for the water to become clear because we ARE the water tap. Searching for an Idea is not a passive process because remember:

“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.”

We have to actively combine elements and look for connections that spark something new.

But what does that actually look like?

Well, while writing we don’t just look at the information but we do something with it: We form sentences, look for wordplay opportunities, try to explain concepts in our own words, we go and look for comparisons, look at the information from the perspective of an alien who asks why we are doing things the way we do them.

And luckily for us our brain wants to do this.

Our brain wants to make sense of our world by any means necessary and it is doing this by constantly looking for cause and effect. (Remember The Science of Storytelling?) Not only can we exploit this to our advantage as comedy writers when we want to misdirect our audience, it is also what I propose we use in order to have a Joke Idea:

We combine elements and let our brain come up with an explanation as to why this works. Or in other words: We combine elements until something strikes us as funny.

But… again: What does that actually look like?

The answer is: Questions.

More precisely we need to ask questions involving our gathered information.

Or differently put: The easiest way to combine elements is by asking questions about the gathered information.

The reason for that is simple. A question is a mini problem that needs solving. A question demands an answer. It forces us to look for an explanation. A question is catnip for our brain.

And the answers our brain (and thus we) come up with will lead us to untrodden paths. It will open up new ways to think about our topic.

Now the problem becomes: Which questions?

Well, all the questions!

Every imaginable question you can think of because we can’t know in advance which question will lead to a funny idea.

Questions will help us shift our perspective and let our brain puzzle pieces together. And what questions you ask will make your approach to the topic unique. It’s what separates you from the other comedians. If you ask different questions than the rest no one else will get your answers.

So how do we get to different questions from everybody else?

By asking more questions that anyone else.

But where do these questions come from? And which are the right questions?

First: You get to the right questions by exhausting the wrong ones. And you exhaust the wrong questions by coming up with a LOT of questions.

Remember: Searching for an idea is exactly that: It is a search. There isn’t a clear cut route to a new idea until we have found it. But with time and experience you will know better how to search for an idea. You will have more tools at your disposal and an ever growing understanding on how to use these tools. Or differently put: You will come up with better questions more quickly.

But again: Where do these questions come from?

One approach to get to the right questions quickly is the Angle of Attack.