How Doing Stand-Up Comedy Can Help Your Writing
On structure, style, and writing with a purpose
I recently read an essay about how watching stand-up comics can improve one’s writing.
The author emphasizes style and wordplay — puns, non-sequiturs, double entendre — as the tools most transferable from comedy to prose. These are good points.
But what about joke writing? There is a process to this as well, and it’s more complex than you’d imagine. Joke writing hones many of the skills in demand by novelists and nonfictionists.
In other words, if you want to be a good writer, try being a good comic.
January 28, 2015. A hundred pairs of eyes were on me as I stood on stage at Goodnights Comedy Club, blinking into the miniature sun of a spotlight. Me, a 42-year-old librarian and English professor. Father of two. Owner of seven cats and a corn snake. Plus my wife had crabs — hermit crabs, in an aquarium.
Jerry Seinfeld. Ellen DeGeneres. Robin Williams. Lewis Black. Jay Leno. Chris Rock. These are people who had stood where I was standing.
How did this happen?
I have loved stand-up comedy since I was a teenager staying up late on weekends to watch A&E’s An Evening at the Improv. I often imagined myself up there…
