Give an elevator pitch for your jokes (and other "nitty gritty" standup advice)

Don’t explain your joke. Don’t treat the audience like they’re dumb. Fewer syllables are funnier. And more...

Some Nitty Gritty Advice For Stand-Up Comedians by Andi Whiskey [San Diego Comedy Scene].

I have a joke I like that always does well and it’s one simple line:

“I’m so bisexual, I named my dildo Alex.”

It took me 3 years to write that one line. That’s stupid. But the first time I told that joke on stage, it was full of words and bullshit. I mentioned the dildo was purple, I explained the joke by saying that the name was gender neutral, blah blah blah. I kept getting wrapped up in the context and details, and the joke never did well. It felt like filler fluff between my heavier hitting jokes, and I eventually dropped it.

But I really liked the premise, so it sat there in my notes waiting for me, and one day I came back to it and I just wrote down the premise of the joke again in one sentence as if I was giving an elevator pitch for the joke I was about to tell.

“I’m so bisexual, I named my dildo Alex.” But then boom. Done. Why did I need to say anything else.

Once you do that, and have a solid break of expectations or twist in as few words as possible, then you can go back and add in more context in the form of tags, but keep them just as simple. My tag for this joke? “Their pronouns are they/them.” Easy laugh with the right crowd.

When I was a younger comic, I had to resist the urge to explain the joke and tell the crowd, “Because Alex could be a girl or a guy depending on my mood.” Sure, I’d get a little laugh out of that but it’s weak. Too many words, and it breaks a main (loose) rule of comedy: don’t explain your joke.

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More from the piece:

Don’t treat the audience like they’re dumb. Act like you both share a little secret and the secret is you both get the joke without having to explain it. If that’s not enough to get a laugh out of the crowd, you don’t have a strong enough joke yet, keep writing.

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Write down your whole joke. Underline the punchline. And circle your tags.

This is good practice to teach yourself basic joke structure, and to also make sure your jokes have structure.

And just as a refresher, basic joke structure is: Setup, punchline. (Tag optional)

If you look at your jokes and it takes a while to get to the underlined part, you have a problem. You’ve just lost the audience in the setup. Get there quicker.

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A lot of new comics make the mistake of running right over their punchlines into the next joke, stepping on the laughs, usually because they’re nervous. You have to give space for your audience to laugh. This comes with practice, but something that can help is telling your brain when to pause by writing down the pause.

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Fewer syllables are funnier. I have a punchline that ends with “And suddenly you’re a trash human being,” but I originally wrote it as, “And suddenly you’re a disgusting human being.” They both draw the exact same picture, but you can probably tell which one is going to be funnier, even without knowing the whole joke.

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An open mic is not a good measure of if a joke is good or not.

Open mics are not a good place to figure out if a joke is good or not. Oftentimes, the audience at an open mic is comprised of comedians and people who were not expecting a comedy show. Neither of those demographics will behave like a true comedy show audience.

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Each crowd is a new relationship you have to build from scratch. You have to introduce yourself. You have to give them a reason to want to be there on this date with you.

Andres Kudacki for The New York Times

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