Week 3 of the Breaking Into Pro Joke Writing workshop rolled along, with fifteen or so attendees, including a few out-of-towners in-town for the Labor Day weekend (from Denver, Chicago, and a couple of cool dudes from Vancouver, who run the Last Laffs Comedy Fest).
We mocked up how a staff would work on a desk piece, specifically a Top List (most commonly associated with Letterman, but this format has been around a long while). The best thing about top lists for writers is that it’s a great way to generate a lot of punchlines from a single premise/set-up, which usually means you get super quality from three or four of the fifteen or twenty punches you generate.
Our premise was: “In honor of Burning Man getting hit with a dust storm this week, we'd like to suggest Top Other Natural Disasters We’d Like to See Hit Burning Man.”
That was a little clunky, because we work fast in the workshop, but we broke into four “writing staffs,” everyone worked their way through, generated punches, pitched those punches, and we assigned a headwriter to choose what turned out to be maybe four useable lines. Not enough to make it to prime time (tops are usually 10), but it was a good exercise.
Here’s how I would have reworked the premise a bit, and rewrangled some of the punches into tighter couplets of “burning man lore/culture” meets “natural disaster lexicon.”
In honor of Burning Man getting hit with a dust storm this week, we'd like to suggest Top Other Natural Disasters You Might See at Burning Man
Ketamine sinkholes.
Acid rain.
High winds.
Herbal warming.
Flash ayahuasca flooding.
Mass pretension overdose.
Hurricane of lickable frogs.
Diarrhea mudslide.
A self-awareness drought.
Meth monsoon.
Hemp locusts.