Week 7 of the Pro Joke Writing workshop hit and ran, and here’s a quick summary of what occurred:
- we began what’s going to be a full month run on developing stories into standup, shows, and career collateral (ie, stuff you have developed and have ready to go whenever someone in the industry asks you about your “plans”)
- we watched Mike Birbiglia’s 7-min story set at JFL, which essentially launched the bigger side of his career, on his sleepwalking disorder, and jumping out of a 2nd story window at LA Quinta while asleep
- we listened to Dana Gould’s “Black Dahlia” bit, which is a full two-minutes of no jokes in service of an amazing punchline, and then a flurry of jokes
- we talked about the major elements of narratives/stories -- characters, plot, settings, dialogue, emotions, etc
- and we talked about flavoring a story with minor elements -- language choice, images, asides, thoughts, jokes, etc
- we ran an exercise where everyone wrote down some of their “exotic” life stories (the stories you have that make people react with, “What? Seriously? Tell me about that.” examples from the group included a former boyfriend’s flexibility, a dad’s incarceration for attempted murder, and shitting your pants on your 18th birthday
- we talked about also being able to flavor “mundane” stories with the major and minor elements (essentially, once you get good at narrative flavoring, all your stories become listenable, even stage-worthy)
- we talked about how the bar is extremely high for using stories on standup stages, that every single word, sentence, major and minor element should be at least stimulating, and best high-level funny
- finally, we talked about the industry, how standup turned toward personal, confessional, lived-experience stories, because those can be turned into shows, and because the larger culture became pretty self-disclosive
- we’ll keep on this huge comedy mechanical area -- creating funny/stimulating stories - throughout October