How to Get Funnier: Write 5 Bad Jokes a Day
As writers, it’s important to have big goals. But we also need achievable daily goals so we know we’re on the right track and to keep up morale. If you’re trying to get funnier, we recommend writing five (bad) jokes a day. Let me explain.
The Joke is the Atom of Humor
No matter what kind of comedy you want to write, jokes can help. They are the most basic building blocks of this process. Focusing on them will help bolster your comedy chops so that weaving humor into longer work becomes less of an effort and more of an art.
A big part of what we do is give people interested in comedy writing a free, easy place to go for community and mentorship, which means we get to see a lot of work by new comedy writers. Very often our first piece of advice to those new folks is to focus on fundamentals.
If you wanted to be a jazz musician, you wouldn’t start by just meandering from note to note on a piano. You have to learn all the rules, play all the scales, and then learn when you can bend those rules. It’s the same with comedy writing, and jokes are those scales.
Big Goals Take Time; Regular Practice Is Right Now
It’s going to take a long time, most likely several years, to get to your big comedy goals, whether that’s being a full-time comic, selling a comedic pilot, or writing a hilarious bestseller. And you might find as you pursue those goals that they change along the way. Try not to judge your success by whether you’ve gotten to some sort of big finish line because most likely that finish line doesn’t really exist.
What does definitely exist is the benefit of regular practice. Not only do you want to strengthen your humor writing skills, but daily practice of coming up with ideas is itself invaluable.
Much has been made of Malcom Gladwell’s idea of 10,000 hours of practice, but the part a lot of people skip over is that you need deliberate practice. Simply doing the same thing over and over again won’t help. You need feedback, community, and mentorship. That’s why I founded the Scene Shop, to help give people interested in writing humor some ways to get together. If your town has improv classes or open mics or sketch writing classes, those are all also great ways to meet other funny people and get their feedback. If you don’t have those, or you just prefer interacting online, that’s where our Discord comes in: https://discord.gg/vGKtWqh
Daily Practice Builds your Idea Machine
You want to get to the point where you have a huge library of ideas behind you. Regular practice can help. It can also give you the confidence that you can come up with good stuff any where, any time, on any subject. I’m not saying it’s possible to be a perfect joke writer, but it is possible to be very, very good. I’ll tell you something important on the other side of this coin: writer’s block is crap.
What would happen if you went to your regular job and told your boss you can’t work today because you just don’t feel like it? You’d be out on your butt. Let’s imagine your boss throws you out of the building. You fall and hurt your butt. So you go to the doctor and say, “Look, I think I broke my butt.” Your doctor just sighs and walks out of the room. Why? Doctor’s block.
If you want to improve, a so-called “block” is not a thing. Maybe you run out of good ideas. Maybe you’re supposed to write five jokes and the last three are terrible. Maybe they’re all terrible. That is totally fine. Write them anyway. Become a monster of meeting your daily goals.
Often when I’m having this conversation with people they will say, well, yeah but this is something I do for fun. Why would I waste my time writing when I don’t feel inspired? Because that’s how you get better.
Even if the product of pushing through is crap, the benefit of having done it is not.
Do this or something like this every day for the rest of your life as a comedy writer, especially when you’re feeling empty or uninspired.
Write Five Bad Jokes a Day
Write five terrible jokes. Five boring, horrible, uninteresting, crap jokes that you’d never tell anyone for fear that the listener would go into a coma of boredom upon hearing them.
If you happen to write a joke you like, that’s acceptable, of course, but don’t worry about quality. Just write the five. That voice in your head that wonders whether what you’re writing right now is any good is disinvited and disconnected for this exercise. We are not writing good. We’re just writing.
Put them in a google doc or write them in your journal and then forget about them.
After a few weeks or a month of doing this, go back and read all the terrible jokes you have written. I guarantee you there will be a few in there that you kind of like. Maybe they won’t be fully formed, but you can polish them up if you want or forget about them forever.
The point is to get into the habit of regular writing, and never, ever, give up.
