People are often curious about where standup comes from and how life gets turned into material for a comedy act. The questions are often phrased in rather egocentric ways. Here are some of them and the replies I'd give if I weren't as sweet and pleasant as I am.
After saying something only mildly funny: "Oh, you're gonna use that in your act now, aren't you? You better send me a royalty check."
Reply: "No I'm not going to use that. It wasn't that good."
After saying something that is actually very funny: "Don't go putting me in your act."
Reply: "Don't worry. You're not interesting enough to put in my act and I only enjoy talking about myself."
After I say something funny: "That was funny. You should put that in your act."
Reply: "It wouldn't work in my act. That joke was custom tailored to the circumstances of this moment and to you. Stripped of context it would no longer be funny."
Whether or not real-life funny can be turned into standup hinges on whether or not the context can be reestablished for an audience who wasn't there and isn't the person for whom the occurrence was originally funny. This is what the "set up" is for. If context can be established quickly with an economy of language then you might just have the basic ingredients of a joke.
Anytime an attempted retelling of a story ends with "well I guess you had to be there" it is a failure to establish context. Another common version of this is "well I guess you'd have to know Julie." Which, by the way, is why I avoid telling long stories about people my listener doesn't know. They're boring.
So it's actually pretty rare that I'm interested in turning something funny from real life into standup for two reasons. Either context would be impossible to establish or depends on too many things to establish quickly. Or the joke isn't about me. Telling a joke about someone else requires that I establish them as a character in the narrative. Since I'd much rather talk about myself I don't usually bother.
I do have a few characters I use in my act. If I can make a joke about one my recurring characters it's far more likely to become standup. My characters are:
- Dumb Straight Boys
- Guys I'm Hitting On
- People Who Annoy Me (Computards, Whiny Chicks, My Family)
All of these characters serve the same narrative purpose, I need people to whom I can condescend.
Enough! If you've made this far then I owe you some funny. Remember
the guy who called me "heteronormative"? It took a few days to gestate but it's turned into a nice little bit. I performed it at
SuperEgo this week and it killed.
HETERONORMATIVE, THE BITI was chatting up this cute college boy and he says, "I love your beard, it's so heteronormative."
/big laugh
Not tuff, or butch, or manly.
(slowly) Het-er-o-NORM-a-tive.
/small laugh
Conforming to societal gender norms.
So I said, "Hey, You're a women's studies major aren't you?"
/big laugh
(act out his reaction of surprise during the laugh) "How did you know?"
(dripping with sarcasm) I'm psychic.
/small laugh
I've got an idea. Let's go back to my place. We can bring down the patriarchy of the military industrial complex with our homo-AB-normative butt sex.
/big laugh
There's a gender equality revolution in my pants and you're invited.
/big laugh
HETERONORMATIVE, THE ANALYSISNotice how many of the details get stripped out of the story to turn it into standup. You don't need to know where he was from, that he was wasted, or that I wasn't actually interested in hooking up with him. The only details needed are that he's in college and that we were flirting.
Notice the streamlining of language, events and reactions. It faster and smoother to say I was chatting him up than to say I was being chatted up by him. Notice how the choice of "chatting up" instead of "talking with" implies a bar setting. "Chatting up" also implies a sexually charged conversation and agenda. These two words paint the whole scene making them a very efficient set up.
The term heteronormative is so odd, it sounds so strange in the ear, and it's use in a pickup line is so patently absurd that the first laugh doesn't even have a punch line. Really the first laugh is still set up for what is to come.
The word is so inherently funny that it gets another laugh, albeit milder, when I say it again slowly. This is fortunate because for a lot of people I bet this is the first time they've heard the word. So it must be defined before I can continue. Usually the need to define a word means there's something wrong with a joke. But here it works.
Usually I avoid repeating words in a joke. Because once you've used a word, the second utterance usually has diminished effect. But this joke bit uses "norm" repeatedly in different forms. This is so I can do the joke that hinges on turning "normal" to "abnormal". I put a strong stress on the "ab" syllable, making it stand out.
The structure of this bit worked out so nicely. It's tight, about a minute, with 6 jokes, that's awesome. It starts with a big laugh and ends on two big laughs.
When I first started doing standup, I would tell these long winding stories with good laughs, but way too much extraneous stuff. It's all I knew how to do. The problem was the laughs were so far apart that the audience would cool off between each one so I wouldn't get any build up of momentum.
Now I know how collapse a story down now to just the bare essentials. I get in, I crank as many laughs out of a premise as I can as quick as I can, and I get out while it's still fresh.
Even the best premise can run dry if you go to the well too many times. So I always try to work a bit for one less joke than it's worth.
P.S. I wrote my first holocaust joke this week. It's about butt sex. I can not tell you how deeply satisfying this is for me. The hope that I created the world's first holocaust/butt sex joke makes me profoundly happy. And before you ask, the answer is "no". I'm not going to post it here. It's just too raunchy and I gotta save something for the show.
Labels: gayer, heteronormative, pickup lines, standup
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