Writing Stand-Up

General

Don't say things with obvious connotations if you're not going to address them. It's distracting.
Comedy is laughing at things for an hour we wouldn't normally find funny.
Know what time is best to write for you. Early morning or late evening. To sift and get through all my ideas and polish them, I really need to have no distractions and become obsessive and autistic.
Work yourself into excitement.
Do the work for the sake of it not the outcome. Write it for yourself so you can perform it with more of yourself. Reset dopamine system and wire it to writing and performing. Welcome boredom, reduce multitasking. Let your mind wander, this is more so where the great ideas come from not conscious effort. Studies have shown being bored will make you more creative and you know from experience when trying to fall asleep.
Brainstorm an idea and all associations. Then brainstorm everything that you just came up with. Then go on a rant trying to follow your gut? This will help you make connections and come up with throwbacks. You may come up with a bunch of lines that you can do in the one chunk or spread out for throwbacks. Making associations are ten times easier if you're looking for edgy, controversial.
Meditate on jokes you like.
Follow your own gut instinct on what is funny. Train yourself to make yourself laugh. You will find and build your audience. Acaster said he hated feeling the pressure to write so he decided to ask himself what he wanted to say...that he's an undercover cop.
This is good. Once you have Subtexts and data you want to exploit and mock, (insecurities of friends), then immerse yourself in templates (common memes)/punchlines (idiom scrolling-I'm going to miss you, say what you want about Ethan etc.) and double entendres. This was pointed out in a video in Comedy Without Erros that Mcintyre just gives you a vague topic like hotels and will makes disconnected jokes and observations and mush them all together at the end for a throwback laugh whereas Chris Rock will give you the clear premise then say jokes that fulfill the premise.
Draft the jokes out loud and vividly visualize the crowd. Repeat a lot. How you say it is as important as the words. Hands, funny words, rhythm in speech. Alliteration, assonance, consonance, repetition, parallelism. Write them out a bunch of different ways too. Does the joke need some filler syllables at the end like Mark Normand's? "ahh" "let it go" or facial expressions to finish it off.
Write scripts/stories regularly with your comedy persona. Trying to integrate as many of your jokes and ideas as possible. Play to the strengths of your persona. Silly, goofy, easy butt of joke. Props, running around,
Do writing exercises primarily involving synonyms, antonyms, idiom scrolling, word association. This can also be done mentally.
Focus on what your mind is excited to riff on (Ethan's speech, Jim's Roast)
Keep all ideas you have at least somewhere. You never know.
Being interesting is as important as being funny. For some premises, you want to be unique and make them want to hear your fresh perspective.
Being memorable is more powerful than likeability. State something that stirs up a strong emotion in you, or at least you use a strong emotion because this is how you have a catchy hook and gain attention. Clear, defined point of view. Do an 'act out' (no longer talking to the audience). Generally, have a clear victim/target.
Topic Diversity. Mike Goldstein who talked about tanning and getting drunk applies to a clear demographic, and Stiles on drugs even broader. Also remember joke style technique. A lot of my best do the same thing.
Absorb comedy regularly. Studies of children show that watching someone else be creative (watching fantasy movie, unstructured play) encourages new insights, analytical thinking and creativity.
Fearing failure stifles creativity.
Regularly try new things and learn unfamiliar topics.
A million angle technique. If you're telling a story, you have scenes that may have happened that you can edit the dialogue in, or you can make up predictable scenes and decide if they're funny enough to include. With Not Going Out's dogging episode, there could have been a line in there in the reveal saying "well why didn't you see us all screaming and realize we weren't going to have sex?!" You are like the news media, you are in control of highlighting elements and completely hiding and avoiding others.

Funny Filters

Practice these in comments sections of all kinds of posts and practice with watching crowd work videos and pausing and making my own remarks.

Throwbacks to other jokes in your set or other comedians.
Weaponizing is a lot like mocking and parody too. Luke Kidgell's "oooh that's very misleading" also works because it sounds funny and fun to say.
Repetition is good with variation. Is it a banana or is it a torch? Is it a boxing glove or is it a shoe? The answer is it's a torch. Running gags.
Parody: The parody I did of Shawn's New Gisborne Joke. Getting as close as possible to the original. Easier when there's a clear victim.
Sarcasm. Inverts truth, exaggerate, unfailry compare, suggest unpleasant consequence, cuts to the chase and summarizes. Irony.
Voices/Impressions. Shanks' trait American accent. "You see! This is the proof!" Dave Chappelle's signature white guy voice. Bill Burr has his classic mocking voice.
Justifying absurd positions. Joe Rogan is an alien then you can use confirmation bias and rub it against the premise. "He started a club called the mothership!" Or Sam Campbell "I'm sick of these underdogs!" Absurd positions will be funny for different reasons.
Shock. What pisses me off is the Queen is gunna be there! Why don't you say it live ya fuckin lazy mole! "Your parent’s divorce isn’t your fault, its that your mum’s a slag."
Idiom scrolling. Pretty close to puns. Having the most relevant colloquial phrase. School shootings? Man, I was gunna say that too, but you got there first, thanks for taking the bullet.
Nonconforming Idioms: Sam Campbell is so good at saying the strangest idioms that kind of sound crazy yet make sense for the situation. "A small garden but well-tended to we hope."
Stretching idioms further. “If this is toxic masculinity then poison me to death!” Can I just add my 2 cents to this piggy bank and see if it squeals. I soldier on with codral. I must admit sometimes I take too many codrals, start fighting battles that don’t exist!
Reverse norms. “Whoops that’s embarrassing my fly’s done up.” “I lost my tree so I nailed a picture of it to a dog”
Absurdity. Creating your own little universe. Monty Python's paying for an arguer. A horse walks into a bar.
Exaggerating Crescendo. Seinfeld’s tiny bit on planes. Tyler Fischer’s Fauci rant of the idea of the possibility of contemplating...
Chaos. Pretending things are going wrong. "Wrong pocket actually."
Ignorance/Misunderstand. Ash's rendezvous or creamy brule joke. A really nice mafia neighbour used to pay me to start his car. Thank God that video finished before that guy got hurt! Pronunciation ignorance or ignorance about a concept etc.
Non-sequiturs.
Ridiculous descriptions: If red was a flavor sir, you’d be delicious. Be subversive and unique in how you describe things. "That lady with the haunting knees."
Similes. How desperate would you have to be to molest Shawn, that's like being so desperate for comedy that you'll watch Mikey Dynon.
Metaphor. Weed is the Devil's lettuce. Also creative description technique. Nicknaming. They call me envelope...coz I'm straight white male.
Irony: Intentionality with unintended consequences. A doctor that hates blood.
Self-referential/Negation: Can be confirmation or negation of premise. Have you heard the joke about gaslighting? No. Yes you have. Should I turn the light on is it too dark in here? Who said that?
Sniffing out contradictions and incongruity. This is key to a lot of crowd work because it's like teasing and flirting. When I pointed out that Sydney comedian call Melbourne people weird and then talk about ripping the cock of a chick, and I even managed to consciously choose the funniest words for that.
Misdirection. Exploiting any possible assumption that is made about the premise. This is saying something and leaving out one of the 5 w’s or how and only revealing that at the end. “Great show, great venue, great audience…one of those would have been nice.” Nearly 4000 sexual assaults occur everyday… in my mind
The Flip-flop. Very similar maybe the same as the fake out. Start off heading in one direction pulling on hearer's expectation. Have you got a gf? "I can't disclose that" Why not? "Coz it's embarrassing I don't have one." Usually binary going from yes to no. Or between two opposites whereas standard misdirection could branch off limitlessly.
The Fake out. Brother of misdirection. "As a black community with the upcoming elections, we need to register...for a legal firearm!" This is like misdirection and flip flop but instead of being binary or infinitely broad it can only vary by the words used in setup.
Misplaced attention. Easy with words like 'this' 'that' 'there' 'this one'. Basically synechdotes. Someone is referring to something and you act as if they are referring to something else. Nan when referring to the lack of room in back seat 'how about the boot?' "Don't be silly you're not sitting in the boot!" A part is named but the whole is understood "eyeballs". Except the understood abstraction is the rug being pulled. Can be done just with nouns "what about Antiques Roadshow?"
Shifting Contexts. This is kind of Similes as well. Good for mocking some's logic. "When someone says 'I’m not racist some of my best friends are black' that's like saying 'I'm not a murderer some of my best friends are alive." It's taking the logic and putting in new situations for inspection.
Quick Reframing is just reinterpreting original meaning. This is best done when not enough meaning is put into what someone has said. Zack said "Penis!" and I said "Steak!... Oh I thought we were saying what we like to eat."
Reductionism. Mostly used as observational. Often trivializes the important and of course you have the inverse as a comedic option but I don't know that's called. Why do men love boobs they're just balls of fat?
Observation. Raw honesty. You have to be hyper perceptive. Catch what everyone else would and MORE. Articulate what people don't even realize they've thought. Most people put all their thoughts through a bunch of filters first. Fresh/interesting take on something familiar. Most things can become funny when broken down and isolated and reduced to absurdity. Observation also appeals to relatability. This at its core is perceptively scanning and knowing weaknesses and strengths. Usually of people and usually to use the weaknesses as joke butts.
Pretending to establish a pattern. 1, 2 4! List of 3. Big big small. Small Small Big. Same Same different. To strengthen the joke, the last one could be something that is a throwback or even something specifically local and relevant to that crowd.
Pattern/Trend Hyperbole. Ben Knights joke about how at this rate we’ll be squeezing dogs over a bin. Using past and present to guess at future.
Double meanings. Puns and phrases. But they can me more complex. Easy to do when the sentence is basic and may have grammatical lack. "They say pineapple makes your cum taste better but i added pineapple to my cum and it's still gross." Childish puns are best used on heavy dark topics and/or grouped together and put in waves. Put the hoe in navajo. I give the best arrowhead around. My name spread eagle. I could do this with my surfer aboriginal joke.
Double Entendre. Can be done multiple ways but I'll use this way to explain it. Jimmy Carr's joke on Supreme Court and abortion. Or the way I can list off all the traits that would cause one to think of religion but instead revealing it's about gender ideology.
Parallel sentences. Sentence structure is similar. As in almost echoing sentences. Seen again with "I’m not racist some of my best friends are black, I’m not a murderer some of my best friends are alive."
Malapropisms. Sentence structure identical except for a word or two swapped out. You don’t cook another man’s meat. You don’t book another man’s retreat. These are good for being sassy and using someone's logic against them "my money my choice!"
Spoonerisms. Transposition error. Loving shepherd shoving leopard. Sometimes the setup for these types will be a drunk or dyslexic person. Or a setup like "the difference between..."
Compare and Contrast/Juxtapose. You do make parallels but not the same kind as in the previous filter. These make up most of Mark Normand's jokes. He explains that these are easier because you have a clear and defined starting point. Otherwise it feels like you're reaching into thin air to find a joke. These are good because you can choose the topics with intention and appeal to more people.
Masking Subtext/Edgy Implications. I think of it as making an observation you think is good but dressing it up a little bit so the hearer must do some of the work. This can often make any kind of dumb insult or observation a bit funnier "how old are you? 23. Ohh tick tock". Like when I pretended to be offering advice on a button on the Bhams remote "can I see the remote, I'm pretty sure if you...where is it oh yeah here we go if you just press this button you can turn this shit off!" The audience needs to figure out the subtext like celebrating Ethan's life in a church again. The darker the subtext the more fertile.
Meta-humor. Breaking 4th wall, commentating on the moment. Not letting anything go unnoticed. "Is this the world's slowest burglary?" Taking hack ideas and revitalizing. What's brown and sticky? Anal.
Needs obvious victim. Even in a simple pun there is a victim. It is the joke teller. Tim Vine and others have to frame themselves as the cheesy goofy victim telling the joke. And they have much self-deprecation to achieve this too. This is what drives so much self-deprecation where comic weaponizes their own weaknesses and insecurities.
Anti-humor. Reading a phone book on stage.
Drawing a long bow. If God didn't want us to eat beef, why did he make cows so slow.
Flawed logic. Idiot brother of negation. They say cigarettes cause testicular cancer, which is why I'm careful to put them in my mouth.
Pointed questions. If you were in a sinking hot air balloon, and you could throw out Hitler or Churchill?
2 Evils. I really only stayed with you because you reminded me of a girl. After being with you I just knew I was a lesbian. Oh. Well could you just tell people that I used to hit you then?
Word Economy
Word specificity. Stewart Lee's change from 'degrading your legacy' to 'degrading the quality of your own obituary'. Jumped in his car, jumped in his buick. Inherently funny words.
Synonym tags. Adding more tags to your joke. Matt Rife "Women what is with the crystals?" "What is all this gravel doing inside Thanos!? Ladies put the pebbles down!"
Synonym Contrasted. Like Mitch Hedberg's reach for a lime joke ending with "saved by the buoyancy of citrus." Lime and citrus, simple and advanced.
Seinfeld says swearing is a shortcut. It gives you all those convenient consonants and perfectly conveys the emotion. But use sparingly, if clean then you are just seen as cheeky and can get away with more. "Think fuck, don't say it."
Edgy/Controversial Associations: Think of how as soon as America comes up, everyone is rushing for a school shooter joke. Or a fat joke. Or Muslims and terrorists. These are hack and over done. You need to be original. With absolutely any topic or concept, how can you quickly drag it to the funny? NGO often goes from bathroom or cleaning related associations and straight to Lee not being hygienic. I did it with Matt mentioning his 21st and going straight to him not having anyone show up. Someone says keyboard? Keyboard warrior! Practice for everything. Laptop? Child porn! See its fun!
Act-outs: Saving the most important one till the end. When you're not doing act outs, you're talking to the audience. I don't like the feeling of talking to the audience. I wanna get inside a fictional scene quickly go go go.
Make news and pop culture references. This works kind of like throwbacks. You're making material out of what you know people have experienced. And roast jokes should also be self-referential "you look like limp ate too many biscuits"
Riffing on facts. "People think Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon, it was actually the person standing closest to the Nagasaki bomb."
Set ups based on emotions: Hard, weird, scary stupid. Emotions at their extreme are best otherwise who cares?

Writing Stand-Up

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