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.