How to Write the Perfect Stand Up Joke?
Writing a great stand up joke is an art. A skill that even the professionals progressively learn and strive to develop themselves in as the day goes by. It goes beyond silly “yo momma“ punch lines that could make a person puke due to its level of absurdity. Good stand up jokes can be likened to good music, poetry or painting and as such entails putting together different elements to ensure that the joke comes out perfectly. Below are some easy, hands-on steps virtually anyone can adopt when writing a stand-up joke:
Pick A Topic:
A concept or an area of concentration. Whichever way you like to see it.
Try to play around topics that you know you can relate to. Topics centered around an experience, an issue of public interest or one of your insecurities works perfectly well.
Many people get discouraged at this stage because they feel some topics might be stupid, ridiculous or embarrassing. But on the bright side, stand up jokes has more to do with making people laugh while sharing your opinion on a ridiculous issue.
Make an Outline of Things You’ll Love to Say About Your Chosen Topic:
An outline is a template that permits you to input all your crazy ideas into your joke.
It contains all the subtopics under your big concept that you’d like to write about.
Now assuming you decided to write about women and the way they act in relationships, You can outline all the silly things you think women do in relationships. Things like how you feel they deal with sex, hygiene, money and anger counts. Picking each point one after the other is very important because it’ll lead you to the next step in the process of writing a great joke.
Build A story Around Your Outline:
Building a story around your outline is the part where you input your ideas into the outline. This stage involves writing a draft or rough work. The draft contains the storyline around each sub-topic in your outline. For instance; say you want to write a joke about how women deal with anger in relationships, you would have to build a storyline around that sub-topic and then write it down as a draft or rough work. The draft can contain all the different variations you’d like that storyline to have. The draft contains your ideas on punch lines and points of emphasis.
Revise What You’ve Written:
Revising what you’ve got on your draft can be likened to cleaning up your desk after a hard day’s work. This is the part where you pick your most preferred storyline for the joke. Also, if any changes need to be made, it is at this point that you can make that workout.
This part is very crucial to how the joke comes out because it’s the final step to writing a perfect stand-up joke. After cleaning up your work, it is also important that you rewrite the entire joke on a clean notepad to avoid getting things mixed up.
Nothing hampers your self-esteem than forgetting a joke while performing, so you need to do a mental revision of your jokes!
People love to laugh but deliberately making people laugh is one of the toughest deals ever especially where stand-up comedy is concerned. It never hurts to also check out the demographics and peculiarities of the people you will be performing to. This helps you create ideas that are best suited and original to your audience.