Avoiding Comedy's Worst Advice

"Dude, Just Write What You Know"

We all want to see our comedy improve but sometimes our
eagerness for a fast track to betterment means we don’t filter advice as well
as we should.

I can’t tell you the number of times in my career where
I’ve had articles, facebook posts, videos and out of their prime headliners
telling me through drunken slurring to “just write what you know”.

I want to make it clear from the beginning that this is
not advice for getting better at comedy.

This is “feels right, must be right” nonsense that is no
different to when politicians do that word flip thing in a speech to sound
clever because “easy to digest ideas are ideas digested easy”. It doesn’t mean anything but it sounds like it’s clever
and relevant and is vague enough no one could hold you to it actually being
effectual.

Of course everything you write about will be things you
have some knowledge of because

that’s how words work.

But it does nothing to say how you should go about using
what you know or how to effectively find out more so that you can write about more things.

I say “feels right, must be right” because for any comic
(especially those starting out) there is such a huge and seemingly
insurmountable amount of information to learn and ingest that anything that can
even remotely shrink that obstacle in our minds is something we’ll cling to
dearly. It sounds good but mentally it has the nutritional value of
cardboard. The intent is there but the reality is lacking. What it’s

. You’re totally
new to standup and what’s more, what you
know is probably what you’ve spent
your whole life doing i.e your work.

And you know what audiences go to see comedy to escape more than
anything? Work. The memory of it, the fear of it, the stress of it, the concept
of it.

People come to standup to forget about their jobs, to forget about their lives. A good show for an audience member can literally make their week so why remind them of work? Sure you can do jokes about your job but you’re more likely to bum people out from reminding them that we’re all marching towards to the same hole at the end of the day. You’ve taken such a big step by even getting on stage and you only take a big step if you’re getting ready for a big swing so follow through with something new.

The medium of standup is totally new to you. There’s no mode of transport to take the information you’re putting into your mind and delivering it to the
audience as efficiently as possible like a pro would. You have to build one from scratch and building anything new means a lot of trial and error. it means taking chances, thinking in new ways and working in completely different modes, all of which are things that aren't helped by doing what you've done before. If
you’re writing what you know you’re setting in place a precedent for giving
people what you think they’ll like and want to hear instead of what you want to
actually write.

My issue with write what you know is that it’s too
limiting. Standup is one of the most ‘out there’ things you can try that literally terrifies more people into panic attacks
than sharks and you want to go to all the lengths of getting onto a stage just to
play it safe and talk about what you know?

The better option is to write what you like.

I don't just mean write whatever you like I mean write about things you enjoy. In
writing what you like you aren’t limited to what you know. There are plenty of
things I like or have an interest in that I don’t know about but in this way of
writing I am pushed to learn more so that I can explore the topic. This way when I write I can write from the perspective or a person who knew little, then some, then a lot about a topic and when bringing this to audiences I'll have far more perspectives to draw from. You can write from the perspective of something or someone you know nothing about, from here you're in a space of pure creativity.

In writing what you like you’ll more quickly remove the
mental restraints you’ve built up over the years to be a functioning 9-5
worker, student, parent, partner, child or any other box you could have slid
into. What you know is more than likely wrong for standup. 12 years of academic
education to teach you information to be recite on cue is just not effective for
a creative endeavor like comedy. Sure it would have taught you how to use
language but to use that in standup as something “you know” will only have you creating wordplay and puns which isn't exactly groundbreaking.

Everyone’s comedy is influenced by what they’ve learned
before they began standup and it’s something to consciously work towards
deconstructing rather then using to define what you should write. Actors always
come into standup with giant character monologues, writers use too many words before a punchline, lawyers always start with
formulaic one liners, teachers try to tell you things and people from high
stress finance jobs are almost always batshit insane stream of consciousness.
It reflects how each have been trained to think in the years in their time
before standup and to continue to write from these perspectives isn’t doing you
any favours. You’re working a new job now and for many outside of the field of
performing it’s a huge deviation in mindset requiring the application of a
whole new set of skills and ways of creative thinking.

Write what you like and if you need more definition on what I mean

. We are all more similar than we are different so if
it can get that response from you then it stands to reason it can potentially
for the same for others. From here treat it like a numbers game, keep putting
out things that you actually find funny and see what resonates. Writing what
you know puts people into formulaic loops of writing what they’ve seen others do but
without any of the creative insight or passion others put behind it, it’s purely one
dimensional. They’re writing for the audience, not for themselves and this is a fight
that every comic will have to constantly engage in throughout their career
because the urge to give people what
 in order to
play it safe never fully goes away.

How do you know
what makes you laugh? Watch comedy, absorb as much of it as you can in as many forms as you can. The
simplest AI that we have available to us can write scripts that only just make
sense but only after thousands of pages and hours of content have been ingested
into their systems to be processed. We aren’t that dissimilar.

Watch standup, find what you like, write what you like
from what you find you enjoy and keep going. Write what you don’t like, write
articles, sketches, essays and reviews. Write what you know and you can
only find comedy in what you know. Write everything and you’ll learn to find comedy in
everything and the latter is going to pull ahead big time when after a while.

It’s about breaking pre-learned behaviors, about writing,
about talking, about thinking. So many new comics cling to the first thing they
learned in standup and are stunted because of it. Newer comics who get the feel
for a pullback and reveal cling to that format for years coasting off of an
easy structure over developing new and insightful content. I’ve seen it happen
time and time again. Some get booked, some even make it big, but in the end they
all hit a wall. The longer they’ve been avoiding it the bigger and more
seemingly unscaleable it’s going to be because it’s been reinforced with only
ever one type of thinking. If you keep changing and evolving then these walls
you need to get past will always be smaller because they won’t be as
ingrained and you’ll have more tools to break through them from all the other ways of thinking you've explored.

You don’t want to be stuck saying what you already know,
you want you’re comedy to lead you to new ways of thinking and feeling and
most importantly, laughing. Because if it can do that for you than it stands
the best chance of eventually doing that for the audience. What’s more the onus of any good comic is to get
better. Who has ever gotten better with working within their means and never
branching out? You need to be continually growing and that means looking for
opportunities to do so wherever they may lie. If anything you should be looking
to write outside of what you know. Take what realm your standup lies in and push it towards
another. One liners to act outs, act outs to stories, stories to opinions and
so on until you're a comedy maverick that can never be pigeonholed or predicted. 

I’ll say this in as many articles as I have to, comedy is
not a series of wins. It is heavy and repeated losses balanced against a few
saving moments that keep you going. But for the most part you will learn more
about who you are and where you want to go from what doesn’t work and why. So
try it all. That’s not to say you should ever find yourself being lazy on
stage without any material at all under the guise of trying to make up a set off the cuff. If you catch yourself or anyone else saying “I don’t have material I’m
just going to wing it” then you can be sure they aren’t trying something new,

Yes, writing about things in your life might make them
more relevant but only if you care enough about them to write them in a way
that makes the audiences care about them. A much more reasonable and grounded
approach is always write what you like.

Write what you like, what you enjoy and have a passion
for and let that passion be communicated to audience so they too can be
excited. If what you like happens to be what you know then by all
means write a killer joke about being an accountant  but you have so much to learn when you first
start standup and you can always be learning more as you progress so you may as
well try something new when you start. I know this works, it’s what I’ve done for years and lets
me put out more content in a month than most comics would in 6. It’s what I
teach, and how I’ve seen comics increase their output and comedic sphere of understanding
by several factors.

There's nothing wrong with writing what you know, there's just so much else out there why wouldn't you explore it?

So sit down, write what you like, write what makes you laugh and
write for yourself and you’re halfway there.

You won’t get better overnight, nothing can do that
for you. Standup’s a long game but these directions will get you where you need
to go in the best way and with the most tools to win.

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