Development Magic

Development of a Joke

When we last left our story, there was a joke sitting in the archives of my computer, for a decade or more:  I hate setting an alarm clock, I think it’s unnatural. The first emotion you experience during your day should not be alarm.

Quietly biding it’s time. Until the day when I started thinking about doing more corporate events. Corporate standup is an odd subset of the standup world that is both lucrative and often not that fun, creatively.  The reason it’s not fun is that it’s highly restrictive.  All comedy has restrictions of some sort, but other than Christian comedy done for Christians at Christian sites, corporate is the most highly restrictive venue for standup comedy. No obscenity, no profanity, no sex, no deviance, and, really, not even any controversial topics or strong viewpoints.

The challenge in corporate comedy is to develop a show that doesn’t offend anyone -- literally, anyone -- and yet is still comedy club level funny.

A lot of people find that much restriction to be too much. Many comedians don't even try for corporate, even though it can pay ten times or more what they get in other venues (ah, corporations and their ability to suck in the cash). I looked at it as a writing challenge. What could I create that I would be proud to deliver on stage -- anywhere, even outside of corporate settings -- and still work within the tiny parameters of being completely clean and inoffensive?

And the first question, where to start? What do you talk about that's fully clean and doesn't yank on anyone's undies? (That yank joke probably wouldn't fly in corporate, by the way)

I usually start by going back through my dumpster files. I write a lot, and keep a huge file of ideas, jokes, joke fragments, sketches, etc., open all the time. I start a new one every year.  So I can always go into this general dumpster of stuff and see if there are gems I’ve forgotten.  Or rocks I probably should have forgotten.

When I went searching for “clean” gems, I found...the alarm clock joke! That’ll work, I thought.  It’s about work, so that’s good for corporate. And no one is going to be offended by setting an alarm clock.

Now the real challenge:  I needed an hour of material.  A 20-second one-off joke wouldn’t do much.  It needed development.

*  *  *

Development is the ability to progress an idea so that it becomes a bigger product.  All creative people have ideas. For comedians, especially, ideas are endless.  They flood in, ruin your conversations, wake you up at night. You are a slave to your brain’s ideas.

But what most comedians don’t do is fully develop those ideas. And it kinda drives me crazy.

I’ve had so many friends over the years who are truly funny, but they produce so little actual product that it astounds me.  They’ll mention something, and I’ll say, “That would make a great animated sketch.” Or, “You should do that as a bit.”  Or sometimes even, “That’s a good idea for a movie.”

And they always light up and agree.  And they never actually sit down and develop their small piece of comedy into a big piece of comedy.

Development is, from what I can tell, literally the difference between being a success and a lingering non-success in entertainment.  If you do development well -- if you turn your ideas constantly into bigger products, and monitor that process each step of the way so that the product is actually good (there’s a big difference between getting something done and getting some done well) -- then you will find so many more opportunities it will make you head spin.  If you simply have ideas, and wait for someone to recognize your genius and develop those ideas for you (or even with you), you’re going to be sitting alone in a creative hallway. A lot.

You have to take charge of developing your own projects. You don’t have to do the development alone -- in fact, you shouldn’t, you should always find others to work with -- but you do have to be the person to drive your own projects forward.  To take them from idea to beat sheet. From beat sheet to outline.  From outline to working draft. From working draft to table read.  From redraft to redraft.  From redraft with great notes from outside critics to actual good draft. From good draft to rehearsal.  From rehearsal to final draft.  From final draft to final draft with a polish.  From final draft with a polish to final draft until the director gets his/her hands on it. And then some more development that will happen on set, while something is actually being shot or performed. And then, really, you can even continue to develop in post-production.

Development is the entire range of adding creativity to ideas in order to create a strong product.  It’s time-consuming, energy consuming, frustrating, hard to predict, requires a ton of creativity.  It requires resources (money) and structure and someone driving the ship, constantly.

But, mostly, it requires a commitment to doing it. Skipping from idea to production without super solid development in-between those stages, almost universally guarantees a weak, almost unshootable, and thoroughly doomed project.  

So, in the end, my little 20-second alarm joke became a 13-minute swath of clean standup about “sleep.”  I’ve used it now for probably ten years. And it kills, everywhere I do it.  I don’t say it kills just to say it kills, it kills.  I can close headlining sets at comedy clubs with it. Pieces of it have been clipped out and played on the radio. People routinely repeat parts of it back to me, and say they think about that routine all the time when they hit their alarm in the morning.

I’m also continuing to do development on it outside of standup, setting it up now to be a full one-person show, and a book. The more development I’ve done -- researching sleep, thinking about all the little odd parts of sleep, asking people about their sleep lives, staying with it over long periods of time -- the more I find to work with.

I don’t know exactly where it will all conclude for that joke. But I do know that doing development on something that began as a tiny little idea of me noticing that an alarm clock is actually an emotion-creating machine, has become a very useful product for me.

All because of development.

From Ha! to Academy Award

A long time ago, something from out in the world made its way into my head, and my head took it apart, and found something new in that something, something that I hadn’t noticed before, and when I noticed it, it amused me.

And that was good.

The something I noticed was someone talking about setting their alarm clock in the morning.  And inside my head, my brain went, That’s weird. An “alarm.”  First emotion of the day, while we’re still asleep, and it’s alarm.

That was funny to me.  It gave me that little splash of brain chemicals I get when something gets into my head and erupts up as humorous.  Thank you, world. Thank you, brain.

Not a super-unusual moment, if you have a sense of humor. And especially not if you have a heightened sensitivity to humor, and you spend a lot of your time on earth seeking out that little brain chemical reaction. You hang out where humor gathers, gather friends who like humor, listen always for the humor possibles.

You a humor-experiencer. Wanter of. Addict.

Which is cool. It’s a human thing. One of the good ones. Doesn’t even cost anything, really.

And, should you desire, you can also take that whole humor-discovery process a few steps further down the line. You can save your humor moments, record them in your head, so that you can tell them to someone else.

At which point that little piece of humor you experienced will need to be evaluated, developed, scripted, produced, and performed. If you’re going to share it, it’s going to have to be taken out of your experience, and transformed into communication that will allow others to experience it, too.

All of which happened with that noticing of “alarm.”  It seriously grew.

Let me explain its awesome little life span.  Let’s begin with the first stage after Discovery:  Evaluation.

*  *  *

I was doing a lot of standup at the time of the alarm discovery, so I usually tried to turn my humor experiences into jokes, or even full bits (collections of jokes on the same general topic), that I could do on stage (or sell, because I was also writing for a lot of comics). Some humorings are easily turned into standup, others not so much.

To figure out whether something is worth working on for bigger standup purposes, you first have to evaluate it.  I use a range of criteria to evaluate something for its standup potential.

Standup Evaluation Criteria

()  Once finished, where would this joke work?  What audience would like it, what setting would it fit in?  Would it work in a comedy club? Especially in an A-room?  Would it work on TV?  At a corporate event?  Or, at the other end, in a bar, or a coffee shop?

()  Will this fit with what else I do in my show?  Does it groove with my mode of comedy, or would it be disjunctive?

()  How strongly funny did this feel to me when I first experienced it? Did it really make me laugh, did it feel super strong? If I found it funny when it first popped into my head, I believe it’s funny forever. Even after I can no longer feel the humor because I’ve looked at it over and over, I trust my instincts that said it was funny when I found it. This kind of self-trust is essential if you really want to create comedy. A lot of standups will abandon things when they go back to them because they lose confidence in something being funny. I never, ever lose confidence in my initial reactions.  That would mean giving away your compass, and then what, you rely on other people to tell you if its funny? You completely trust the audience?  I’ll kill off a joke if it consistently doesn’t work with an audience, but I assume it’s not working because I couldn’t figure out how to communicate it well.  I never doubt my radar.

()  How unique is this idea?  Is it something lots of people have thought of, or could think of?

()  How strong is the idea within the joke? Is it clever, snappy, thought-provoking?

() How original is the joke? Are other people doing similar things? And by similar, I mean very similar. I don’t care if people do the same topics, it’s silly to say things like, “Carlin talked about weathermen, no one else should do that because you’re copying him.” You’re only copying if the angle you take is the same, or the wordings are the same, etc.  No one owns a topic, you just have to find your unique take on it, and then it’s all yours.

()  Can this idea be expanded into something bigger, something long enough to fill a significant amount of time?  Does it have lots of sub-areas, things I can veer off into, is it explorable?  If it’s just a short one-off joke I’m not as interested in it, because I like longer things that I can fill out with texture and depth.

() Does this seem like it will be fun to work with? Does it have enough juice in it that I will enjoy working on it, maybe for months, as it grows?  When it’s done, will it be fun to perform this bit, maybe for years?

() Does this have any important downsides right up front?  Is it a dark joke that will require people to be open to dark humor? Is it sexual, or deviant (drugs, etc.), and how often do I want to do bluer material (will that change all the other jokes I’m going to do?). Will the joke be controversial, will it cost me with sensitive people, or people who disagree with the angle I take?  Is the joke good enough to overcome the downsides?

() Does this joke have huge upsides? Can it be turned into a monster piece of standup, something maybe 10 or more minutes long, filled with awesome punches, something that always works, always kills, nearly everywhere?  Can it be taken even higher than basic live standup, can this become a marquis bit that people will remember, tell to others, will the bit advertise me and get media notice?  Finally, can the bit be developed into something outside of standup? Could it be a short, a web-series, a sitcom, or a film?

() Finally, can I sell the joke to someone else? Does it fit someone I know who buys material?  Because I may evaluate it in a certain way, and reject it for me, but a different kind of comic may find this joke to be something that fits perfectly with what they’re after.

Okay. There’s my evaluation array.

When I applied it to the alarm joke, it came out:  eh.

The joke felt like a little trifle. Kind of amusing, but that’s about it.

I would sometimes use it in my show. But, really, it was pretty much dormant inside my computer.

For at least 10 years.

Until one day, my criteria changed a bit. I found a reason to pluck that out of the thousands and thousands of jokes I’ve written, and put it into Development.

And, wow, did it grow.

Which I'll talk about next week.