The Serious Guide to Joke Writing: How To Say Something Funny About Anything pdfdrive com

Panic Is The Enemy
Of Joke Writing
We cannot escape fear. We can only transform it into a companion that
accompanies us on all our exciting adventures.
Susan Jeffers
The  best  and  most  creative  of  people  panic.  I  recently  watched  an  old  film  of
Paul  McCartney  singing  Yesterday  at  the  Royal  Variety  Performance
1
.  He’d
never sung it in public before and you can clearly see the beads of sweat on his
forehead.  The  caption  underneath  said  that  Paul  McCartney  admitted  later  he
was  really  nervous  because  he  thought  the  song  was  no  good  and  everyone
would hate it!
The good thing is he still went out and sang it.
So if you accept that we all panic, the only difference between a creative person
who  does  things,  and  someone  paralysed  into  displacement  activity,  is  that  the
doers have learnt to put their panic to one side, keep doing the work and trusting
their process.
I think there are three broad types of joke writers’ panic:

---