The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

I’ve been taking another comedy class- this time it’s “Advanced Joke Writing and Character Development” -and will be doing an Open Mic at Topaz on June 14th.  It starts at 8, and I’ll be doing ten minutes.

It’s been a lot of fun, because we’ve spent a lot of time in class just brainstorming ideas back and forth about each other’s premises, perfecting each other’s punchlines, etc.  One of the important things that we’re doing is developing our jokes to match our personas- sometime the joke you come up with, the way you come up with it, isn’t a joke you can tell.  Sometimes you have to abandon the joke completely or give it to another comedian, but sometimes you can re-work it to make it work for you.

So one of the exercises we’ve done is to write a joke about gas prices, but not a stand-alone joke.  We’d probably all end up writing the same hackneyed joke if we just tried to write a joke about gas prices.  We had to write a joke about gas prices that would fit within a bit we already had.  For example, I do a joke about people who called me at the temp agency to look for work, but then couldn’t write down my email address because they had called while driving.  So my gas prices joke is, “Look, gas is expensive.  When I get in my car, I think I need a new job, too, but that doesn’t mean I start looking RIGHT THAT SECOND.”

It’s not that great of a joke, and I probably won’t keep it, but it flowed well with the bit and fit in neatly with the tone of the jokes surrounding it. 

Last night, we did some really great work on a bit I got the idea for last week when Tom said something funny about the Pottery Barn catalog.  Want to hear the bit?  Come to the open mic.  But I’ve got tons of notes to go through and make a bit out of, and meanwhile the bit about the road trip we took last summer is coming along really well.  I even made a Louisiana Purchase joke in it.  That people LAUGHED AT, mind you.

So it’s going well, and I’m going to try to tape the open mic so I can get it up on YouTube.  In the meantime, I leave you with this bit of amusement from Slate’s Human Nature column:

The Internet is killing the porn industry. For the first time in years, video sales and rentals are down. Old trend: The Web helped the industry by facilitating anonymous purchases and downloads. New trend: It’s drying up demand for paid porn by facilitating uploads of free, cheaply made porn. Old complaint against porn: It’s crudely made trash. New complaints by porn industry: 1) Free porn is crudely made trash, whereas we use sophisticated actors, sets, and lighting. 2) Porn consumers don’t seem to appreciate the difference. 3) When we offer them free samples, they just use us for their pleasure and leave us with nothing. Human Nature’s view: For all you sophisticates in the porn business … it’s called irony.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 4:33 pm and is filed under Technophilia, Villainy, comedy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.